


Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Bees

by Antilocapra



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Amputation, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda, More tags will be added as work goes on, Panic Attacks, Post-Game, Yikes, child danger, does HLVRAI seriously still not have its own tag?, for like a second, kind of, like seriously so much talking, lots of talking, more characters will be added as work goes on, sorry half-life peeps, tommy is here too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26492755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antilocapra/pseuds/Antilocapra
Summary: Gordon Freeman is dreaming.That’s the only option, really. He can’t be hallucinating - he’d taken shrooms a few times in college and it hadn’t been anything like this. Yes, the colors of the world changed, and textures were different, but it was an overall pleasant experience every time, and so far, this is not. There are floating islands in a vast, oddly-lit nebula, there are fuzzy multicolored spheres in the distance, there are far-off winged shapes moving slowly through the air - this is a whole different world, this is something strange and alien and - and -This is Xen. He has to accept it. He’s back on Xen, and he’s dreaming, because that’s the only acceptable option.
Relationships: Benrey/Gordon Freeman
Comments: 112
Kudos: 378





	1. Who Am I to Diss a Bee

**Author's Note:**

> Hey hi hello I have fallen into the HLVRAI pit and I'm okay with it. It's nice down here. I'm mostly using this as a way to gear up for doing more writing later in the year, so not entirely sure how long it'll be, but I'm planning on about three chapters. Since when I started, I thought this would be a ~3,000-word one-shot, we'll see how that goes. Also, writing in present tense is unusual for me, so please point out anywhere I slipped into past tense during actions, etc. I'll do my best to self-edit, but this is un-beta'd. Thank you for reading!

Gordon Freeman is dreaming.

That’s the only option, really. He can’t be hallucinating - he’d taken shrooms a few times in college and it hadn’t been anything like this. Yes, the colors of the world changed, and textures were different, but it was an overall pleasant experience every time, and so far, this is not. There are floating islands in a vast, oddly-lit nebula, there are fuzzy multicolored spheres in the distance, there are far-off winged shapes moving slowly through the air - this is a whole different world, this is something strange and alien and - and - 

This is Xen. He has to accept it. He’s back on Xen, and he’s dreaming, because that’s the only acceptable option. They got out already, all of them, they got _out_ , and they got _home_ \- hell, even _Benrey_ got out - so he can’t be back on Xen for real, because that would just be too unfair.

Not that anything in his life has been fair for the last few years, but. Still.

On that note, he goes to rub the stump of his right arm. It’s been giving him more trouble lately, almost six months out from the Black Mesa incident. But instead of touching the familiar truncated space of his arm, Gordon barks his knuckles against hard metal and hisses in shock.

Slowly, he draws his suddenly-heavy arm up and stares down at the multi-barreled gun where his hand used to be, where empty space should be - and he maybe told himself it was attached to the suit somehow before, but now he’s in drawstring flannel pants and a soft cotton shirt with pit stains and holes at the hem and he can see where the metal merges with the flesh below his elbow and it’s wrong, wrong, _wrong_. 

His skin is stretched and swollen, as if the gun-arm burst from his bones and punched its way out through the healed-over scar tissue. There are ragged tatters of darkened flesh stuck to the metal with a baked-on look, and a solid two-inch band of his arm is discolored and red, with several thin streaks of crimson trawling their way up, tracing the veins toward his elbow. And it’s heavy - he can feel the strain in his elbow already. But why wouldn’t it be? He’s got a fucking _minigun_ attached to his forearm, it must be twenty pounds of metal, if not more. The suit must have compensated before, but - but now he _doesn’t have the suit_ \- 

Gordon drops to one knee and rests the barrel of the gun-arm on whatever passes for the ground here. It’s strangely spongey, and he remembers how his feet almost sank like quicksand before - the first time - no. This isn’t like that. This isn’t real. This is a dream. Benrey isn’t going to float like a colossus around the edge of a hovering asteroid-island-thing, there aren’t going to be any peeper puppies, or more of whatever those ballsack things were. Gordon is going to sit right here and close his eyes and try not to look at the ruin of his arm, and he’s certainly not going to think about what will happen to Joshua if this isn’t a dream. If it isn’t, if something has gone wrong, then Joshie is asleep in his room in Gordon’s apartment that he hasn’t had to pay rent on for the last six months, and he won’t understand why his dad’s disappeared again, he’ll wake up in an empty apartment - but no, of course he won’t, because Benrey has been staying on the couch for the last three months. Benrey will take care of Joshua if this isn’t a dream.

“Hey, yo, what are you doing here?”

Well, shit. 

Gordon turns his head so fast his ponytail whips his own neck. He stares into the shadows of the outcropping he’s crouched at the edge of. Sure enough, there’s Benrey, sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms folded on top of them - and praise be to every god there is, he’s not thirty feet tall. But he is back in his guard uniform, and that’s bad enough. He’s taken to stealing and wearing all of Gordon’s softest clothes, which means Gordon’s been out of fuzzy socks for weeks, and now the hard lines of the heavy guard uniform look out of place.

“What am _I_ doing here?” Gordon snarls, defaulting to anger as he always does when he’s confused. “What are _you_ doing here? This is my dream!”

“Aw, you dream about me? That’s kinda cringe, bro. Kinda gay, haha.”

“No, nope, that is not what I said.” Gordon drags himself to his feet, feeling the pull of the gun arm deep in his shoulder, all the way down into his fucking back, and staggers over to flop down a respectable distance from Benrey. He’s getting used to the guy living in his apartment, but this place is different. Bad memories. 

“Oh, whoa, what happened to your arm?”

Gordon thumps his head back against the wall of the outcrop and grits his teeth. “Benrey, dude, I am not in the mood. This is the shittiest dream, my arm fucking hurts, I’m pretty sure it’s infected even though I have no idea how that could even happen so fast, and I don’t know WHAT the FUCK is HAPPENING.”

“It’s a, um.” Benrey blinks, his eyes glowing faintly in the shadow of that stupid helmet. “‘S like uh, a uh, shared hallucination. Sense memory. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah, no shit Sherlock, I don’t want to be here. Can I just wake up?”

Benrey shakes his head, and Gordon realizes that Benrey hasn’t looked at him once. He’s just been staring out across the endless vista of the glowing clouds and floating islands, his eyes unfocused, blank, almost like he’s - wait a minute.

“Hang on.” Gordon reaches over and jabs Benrey in the shoulder with his good hand, rocking him slightly. “Is this your dream? Is that what you’re saying?”

Benrey mumbles something into his folded arms and ducks his head a little lower.

“What was that? You wanna speak up for the class? Because this is freaking me out, man, I am freaking out, and I need to know if this is real or not, because Joshie’s asleep in the apartment and if neither of us are there -”

Benrey’s eyes widen, the yellow glow blowing out as his pupils shrink to pinpoints, and Gordon has a horrible feeling. More specifically horrible than the generally horrible feelings he’s been feeling since he opened his eyes and saw Xen, at least.

“Joshua’s in the apartment, right? He’s not...he’s not here, is he?”

Benrey’s eyes flick over to meet his for just a moment, and for that split second, Gordon’s world goes sideways. Everything in his vision melts like a bad video transition, colors bleeding and shapes pushing out of them like sea monsters under a layer of scum. Distant shrieks echo in his ringing ears, and he smells copper and ozone, and Benrey’s distorted shape has too many limbs, too many eyes - and then Benrey’s gaze darts away and everything snaps back into place.

Gordon gasps slightly and rocks forward a little, as if he’d been pushing against a resistance that suddenly vanished. The place where the gun connects to his arm throbs with every pounding heartbeat until he calms his breathing and leans back again, shaking only a little bit. He’s proud of himself for that. Good job, Gordon.

“...Benrey?” He usually defaults to anger, but when he really gets worked up, Benrey just watches him and grins, and Gordon’s not sure he wants that level of regard right now if it means more of...whatever that was. So he’ll try to rein his temper in for now, but he won’t like it.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Benrey mumbles. “Don’t have your passport. Gotta have uh - a dream passport, gotta get it stamped at the, the dream station, shouldn’t just hop the train like a, some sort of uh, train robber, ‘s rude, ‘s not nice, you’re not supposed to…”

His voice trails off into mumbles again, and Gordon feels himself begin to get properly worried, because this is feeling less and less like a dream. Any sort of pain or discomfort usually wakes him up, but his arm is still faintly throbbing, his back is aching already from trying to keep the weight of the gun propped up, and his bare feet are getting jabbed by bits of gravel from the outcropping. He shifts his weight a little, wincing at the drag of the gun, and crosses his legs.

Another flock of those weird winged things goes by, and Gordon watches them for a moment. They almost look like manta rays, except flying through the air rather than water. Assuming this is air. Maybe it’s some weird alien liquid that humans can breathe. The Science Team didn’t have trouble breathing before, and none of the creatures had trouble breathing in Black Mesa - but wait, no, he’s getting sidetracked. Logic doesn’t matter here, because this is a dream.

But he’s never seen Benrey this unfocused, this unsettled. And he never had a reaction like...like that just from looking at him before. He’s seen some of Benrey’s extra eyes in the dark of the apartment when he wanted to see the TV screen better without turning on any lights, and Benrey’s not shy about changing his size or number of limbs, though he is cautious when Joshua’s around. The kid’s six, he might be traumatized - even though he took to Benrey awfully quickly and has seemed to take all of his quirks and oddities in stride so far. It’s Gordon who still has trouble sometimes, even though he knows at least half the time Benrey is actively trying to freak him out.

Not this time, though. He wouldn’t go so far as to warp Gordon’s whole _perception_ on purpose, would he?

He better not.

Gordon reaches out and wraps his hand around Benrey’s elbow where it’s resting on his knee, squeezing gently.

“Hey, man, I need to know what you know, okay? Information sharing time.” He swallows. “Please.”

He says the last part as a statement, but Benrey’s head comes up and his eyes focus on Gordon’s hand on his arm. If it wasn’t for the glow, Gordon wouldn’t have noticed in the shadow of his helmet, but Benrey’s pupils expand as he stares, then blinks. He looks up, but his eyes are focused off to the side on a fixed point level with Gordon’s ear. 

“Huh?” he says, but Gordon knows by now, so he waits for Benrey’s brain to catch up to his ears. 

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Benrey says after a moment. “It’s not - I don’t need to sleep.”

“So you are asleep?” Gordon asks, squeezing his hand to keep Benrey focused. “This is a dream?”

Benrey nods, then shakes his head. “It’s not...sleep mode sucks, bro, it’s lame, not poggers at all. I'm not...I don’t like to stick around, cause…” He tilts his head and flicks his eyes out at the barren crags of the nearest floating island. “And you shouldn’t’ve come, s’not good for you, don’t have your credentials -”

“Forget about the passport, Benrey. Can you change things? Can you wake me up or anything?” Gordon squeezes Benrey’s elbow again when his expression goes a bit panicked. “Can you fix my arm?”

Benrey’s brow wrinkles. “Bro, don’t be uh, a big mean,” he says. “If I could fix it, I would’ve already. Thought it was gonna grow back, anyway. Everybody else’s would’ve. Stupid...Human Feetman.”

“That doesn’t even - never mind. Whatever. I know you can’t fix it in real life, but if this is a dream, if this is _your_ dream, can you at least get rid of the gun part?” Gordon lets go of Benrey’s elbow and uses his good hand to help drag the weight of the gun up and prop it across his lap, then reaches up and raps his knuckles gently on Benrey’s helmet. “Want me to say please again?”

Benrey flinches and looks down at the black metal, the ragged skin, the swelling and discoloration. His eyes widen, and Gordon can see the sharp edges of his teeth as he opens his mouth. “Bro, that’s not...that doesn’t look good.”

Gordon takes a deep breath. He can do this. It’s just a dream. A dream he can’t wake up from yet, apparently, but whatever. He can deal with this. He will not spend more time on Xen shooting at Benrey’s big stupid face. He can break the cycle. This is fine.

“Yes, I know,” he says in a stilted voice, carefully choosing his words. “Can you make it look better? Can you take the gun away? It’s…” he falters, then sags. “It’s _really_ fucking heavy, man.”

“Uh…” Benrey looks cagey. “I mean, I can...I can try?”

“Great!” Gordon fills his voice with as much pep as he can. Now they’re getting somewhere. “That’s great. What do you need me to do?”

Benrey starts to look up at him and Gordon can see him remember why that’s a bad idea. He jerks his gaze off to the side again so quickly it almost makes a sound, and almost at the same time, Gordon closes his eyes on reflex. 

“Oh hey, that’s a good idea. Stay like that, but like, give me your...arm-gun thing.”

Eyes still closed, Gordon raises his right arm and immediately has to catch it with his left hand as the weight drags at his elbow joint. But he feels Benrey’s much cooler hand bat his away and catch the gun - or at least, he assumes that’s what happens, because the weight is supported. He can’t feel anything on the gun part of his arm, because it’s not supposed to be part of him, it shouldn’t be part of a human body at all - 

He cuts that train of thought off at the same time that he hears shifting cloth, and then Benrey’s other hand is pressing gentle fingers against his bicep, so he turns his upper body toward Benrey to give him better access.

Benrey’s breath catches slightly and he mumbles something Gordon can’t hear. The cool hand shifts to grip his upper arm just above the elbow, and then Benrey mutters something else that sounds almost like a different language. There’s a tugging sensation, which almost feels nice for a second as it takes pressure off Gordon’s elbow. But then something deep in his arm tears and his eyes snap open as he looks down with a strangled shout.

Benrey still has one hand on Gordon’s arm just above the elbow, but his hold has tightened to a vice grip, and Gordon can see where the tips of his fingers have darkened and sharpened into claws. That usually only happens when he’s startled - or scared. The barrels of the gun are in his other clawed hand, and he’s leaning back, his wide eyes fixed on the stump of Gordon’s arm.

Only it’s not a stump. It’s a gaping wound, with jagged bone visible through the shredded muscle and slick white tendons that hang loose from where the gun was. The red streaks haven’t left Gordon’s skin, and he can see why - the inflammation goes under the skin, and there’s a ring of bloody pus where the gun attached, glistening yellow and dribbling into the meaty mess of his forearm. It doesn’t look like it was sawed, it looks blown off, like he tried to pick up a landmine, and Gordon makes an inhuman noise through clenched teeth as the pain comes at him in sickening waves.

“Oh fuck, that’s not - that’s not right, I didn’t - I don’t - hang on,” Benrey babbles, and then he’s coughing out a frantic stream of teal green orbs that splatter against the wreck of Gordon’s arm. But instead of the familiar cool relief of the teal green heal beam, the sweet voice burns like acid, and Gordon jerks his arm away with a scream, scrabbling backward to avoid the rest of the orbs.

Benrey snaps his mouth shut and claps his free hand over it for good measure, and luckily he’s still staring at Gordon’s arm when Gordon looks up because avoiding eye contact is not high on his list of priorities right now. He remembers to look away as soon as he sees Benrey’s eyes, but no matter how quickly he looks away he still clearly sees the look on his face. Benrey is _terrified_.

Gordon’s pulse is pounding in his ears as he gasps for breath, his head spinning as he looks down again. Some rational part of his brain that’s been trampled by the rest of his panicking thoughts suggests he’s probably going into shock. As he blearily watches two thin streams of blood spurt several inches out of his arm with every heartbeat, he’s inclined to agree. He’s losing blood fast, the sweet voice isn’t working, and this is wrong, this is all so wrong.

He heaves in a breath and swallows thickly. “Put it back,” he rasps. “Put it - Benrey, put it back, I’m gonna bleed out -”

Benrey jolts like a switch flipped and scrambles forward, reaching out with both hands and lining the gun up - with a third hand, whatever - and then he’s pressing the bloody, ragged edge of the gun to the bloody, ragged edge of Gordon’s arm. Gordon stares as his skin seems to stretch over the base of the gun, settling it into his arm like tree roots growing over a rock, and then he feels something under his skin click into place, and he hates that he’s relieved.

Time seems to slow down. Gordon can hear his own pulse and his too-loud breathing, and he can feel one of Benrey’s hands rubbing up and down his back. It’s shaking, like the hand still supporting the gun is shaking, but Gordon won’t mention it. He just drops his head down onto Benrey’s shoulder with a thump and breathes for a few minutes.

Eventually, he rolls his head sideways and tucks his sweaty forehead against the cool skin of Benrey’s neck. “You sure this is a dream?” he mumbles. “Cause it feels more like a nightmare.”

And then he’s giggling helplessly into Benrey’s throat. Benrey wraps his arm around Gordon’s back and tugs him closer, tightening his grip as he chuckles a little roughly, too. He gently places the barrels of the gun-arm down on Gordon’s lap, then wraps his other arm around Gordon’s shoulders, and, yep, this is definitely a hug. Oh well, what the hell. Gordon slings his free arm around Benrey’s waist and presses his hot forehead into Benrey’s cool neck, and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

And then he stops breathing, because he hears something familiar.

Far off in the distance, slightly distorted by the general weirdness of Xen, there is a little voice shouting “ _wheeeee!_ ”

Gordon knows that voice. He would know it anywhere. His skull cracks against Benrey’s jaw as he snaps his head up to look around frantically. Seeing nothing, he staggers to his feet, weakly dodging Benrey’s attempt to grab him, instead stumbling out of the overhang they’ve been tucked into. He stares out at the nebula, wildly scanning the field of floating asteroid islands.

And - there - he sees him, half a mile away and using one of those bounce-pads like a trampoline, looking like he’s having the time of his six-year-old life.

“Oh shit,” Benrey says behind him.

Gordon takes a deep breath and puts all the dad-voice he can muster into his panicked yell.

“JOSHUA!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Now with art!_ Gh0st on Twitter did a FOUR-PAGE COMIC of the first scenes of this chapter. FOUR WHOLE PAGES! THAT'S SO MANY DRAWINGS! Go look at it, go go go, it's fantastic and the fourth page especially is STUNNING and I am so humbled and in awe that someone would take the time to draw out FOUR WHOLE PAGES of art for a silly idea I thought of on the way home from work one day that took over my brain for, like, a month and a half. See it [ here ](https://twitter.com/mega_gh0st/status/1337877468317933573).


	2. Hold Your Head Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, wow, we are all going on a journey here folks, because I did not plan for this thing to keep growing. But here we are, and there's still more to go, especially since I didn't even get to the full explanation in this chapter. I have things outlined out, but new stuff keeps cropping up as I write, so we might still be more than three chapters. Who knows? I sure don't! Let's find out together! Comments are always appreciated, and thank you for reading!

Gordon bites back a curse as he staggers to a stop on another floating island. His bare feet are not suited to all the running and jumping he’s been doing, and he finds himself missing the HEV suit for the first time since he tore it off after the Resonance Cascade. The ground here looks mostly soft from a distance, but it can change from spongey to rocky to weirdly grassy with almost no visual difference, and it’s throwing him off. 

Hissing in discomfort, he looks up to gauge his location in relation to Joshua’s. The island he’s currently on is a bit lower than Joshie’s, which means he can only see his son when he’s in the air above the bounce-pad. He’s started waving at the apex of each jump as Gordon gets closer, and Gordon pastes on a smile and waves back before Joshua disappears below the ridge of his asteroid-island.

Benrey has been jumping island-to-island too, but the way he drifts into each landing like a snowflake is making Gordon think that he’s just humoring him. His own hard landings have obviously been noted, as Benrey’s face draws tight every time Gordon minces his way across a rocky area or snarls swear words under his breath when his feet scrape against something. Twice Gordon hears the high, ringing tone of the sweet voice and darts away to avoid it, resulting in more pain and Benrey’s mortified apologies. Gordon doesn’t blame him, really - it’s become such a habit in the last few months to ask him to heal any minor bruise or scrape, and he always seems so excited to be able to help. Joshua especially loves to play with the colored lights the sweet voice manifests while Benrey carefully holds his knee or elbow and directs most of the teal green glow where it needs to be.

Actually, thinking about the careful way Benrey handles his son gives Gordon an idea. He turns slightly to glance at the guard out of the corner of his eye and sees that he’s got one hand over his mouth, brightly-colored liquid dripping over his fingers and shining in the glow from his downcast eyes. Gordon hadn’t even heard the sweet voice that time - Benrey must have caught it before it could get anywhere near him. Well, if he agreed, this would kill two birds with one stone.

“Hey, Benrey?”

“Whuh?” He wipes his face with both hands and flicks them out, sending blue-green liquid splattering out from his fingertips that fades upon contact with the ground.

“Could you go on ahead and stay with Joshie? I’m afraid he’s going to bounce right off that island or something.” Joshua rises up in the air, waves, and begins to fall. Gordon waves back.

Benrey looks from Gordon to Joshua’s island and back, then smacks his lips and mumbles, “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Thanks, man,” Gordon says with genuine relief. He hadn’t wanted to yell any more at Joshua for fear his son might try to make his own little way across Xen, and Gordon doesn’t think his heart could take that. As long as Joshua is bouncing, he seems happy, so Gordon’s going to pick his battles and call that good. But it will definitely make him feel better to have someone who is at least a little closer to being an adult supervising his son, preferably within arm’s reach. 

Joshua appears. Joshua waves. Gordon waves back. Joshua disappears.

Benrey gives a thumbs up, then trots a few steps and kicks off and, yep, he’s just gliding through the air like he did before. He’s definitely been humoring Gordon - though staying a step behind him had the added benefit of making it easier to avoid eye contact. Gordon can appreciate that. 

Joshua appears. Joshua waves. Gordon waves back. Joshua disappears.

In less than a minute, Benrey banks around a few more islands and rises up over the edge of the island Joshua’s on. Gordon waits and watches for a long moment, his right arm hanging heavy and painful at his side. He’s just about to start the runup necessary for his next jump when there’s a flash of blue where Joshua had been bouncing.

Benrey rises into the air, arms crossed and legs perfectly straight. Joshua is perched on his shoulders, one little hand tightly gripping the guard helmet, the other raised so he can flail his arm at Gordon, squealing as Benrey rises higher than Joshie could alone, then begins to drop as if gravity actually affects him. 

They disappear below the horizon as Gordon gapes, unable to pull himself together enough to decide whether or not this is a good thing. But then they’re rising again, and now both Benrey and Joshua wave at the apex of the jump, and okay, all right, that’s probably as good as he’s going to get. Gordon waves back, then takes a few steps backward before lunging forward and leaping to the next island a few yards away.

This time he goes to the ground when he lands, hitting so hard it feels like a full-body cymbal crash. He’s stubbed every toe at least once, and he’s afraid to even look at his feet because he’s pretty sure they’re bleeding. His whole right arm is aching, and since he has to use both arms to keep his balance in the air between islands, it feels like both his elbow and shoulder are going to dislocate. The limb below his elbow and above the gun is throbbing constantly now, but he can’t think about it or it’ll take over his brain. As long as he has a goal, he can focus on that and try to ignore the pain. He’ll get to his son, then he’ll hold Benrey down and make him answer all his questions, then he’ll wake up somehow and never go to sleep again. Good plan, Gordon.

As he pulls himself up onto his knees, something orange becomes visible around the edge of one of the island’s weird column-tree-things. Gordon’s breath catches, but then he realizes what it is and he heaves himself to his poor abused feet, staggering his way over to it.

The HEV suit is face down on the ground, stretched out flat with its arms at its sides. With the helmet on, it could be a statue. But it’s not, it’s definitely not, because there’s a jagged spear of reddish-brown chitinous material that’s punched through the back of the suit and now stands nearly two feet up like a little flagpole. Gordon assumes it’s snapped off either on the chest side of the suit, or somewhere inside it. It looks like a headcrab leg, but way bigger than any headcrab Gordon ever saw in Black Mesa or on Xen. Maybe there was only one, and after it fought this guy, it was so injured from losing its leg that it wandered off and died?

Nah, that would be too lucky. Better work quick before it comes back, because with Gordon’s luck, the damn thing is probably right around the corner. He plonks the muzzle of the gun on the ground and leans forward, his left hand clumsy and awkward as he fumbles with the catches at the top of the boots. He really hopes whoever this was has been dead long enough to mummify or rot away or decompose in whatever way Xen chooses to do things, because if he pulls this boot off and human soup comes out, he is going to start screaming.

Instead, when Gordon gingerly tugs the first boot off, he finds that the body has been reduced, somehow, to a perfectly clean skeleton. He flinches at the sight of the bone for a moment, remembering other skeletons from another time, but it doesn’t move as he eases the boot off. Somehow all the small bones of the ankle and foot remain in place, which is...impossible, really. He looks closer for pins or glue or something, but there’s nothing there. 

“What the fuck?” he mutters to himself. There should be an undersuit or clothes of some sort - no one would be insane enough to wear a contraption like the HEV suit over a naked body, there were way too many potential pinch points. Not to mention the lack of padding - but as he sets the boot upright on the ground next to him, he sees that there is, in fact, padding. Quite cushy stuff, too, resembling nothing more than the soft inside of his slippers that Benrey keeps stealing…

Oh, right. This is a dream. This is _Benrey’s_ dream. Of course the entity that persists in calling him “Feetman” would imagine soft and cushy HEV suit boots.

That...that makes sense, right? Gordon decides that makes sense. Time to move on.

He fumbles his way through opening the clasps on the other boot, then eases both onto his aching feet. He tucks the flannel pants in rather than try to stretch them over the metal boots, then stands up and stares down at the prone body in orange and black metal with naked skeleton feet sticking out the bottom like weird tiny bird legs.

“Thanks, buddy. I guess,” Gordon winces. “I mean, sucks to be you, but...yeah. Hopefully you’re not actually real or anything - oh my god, why am I talking to you, please don’t answer back.”

The body remains immobile and silent - which, in hindsight, wasn’t a guarantee in this bizarro dreamscape world. Gordon shudders slightly and glares up at the next island. Luckily its positioning blocked the sightline from Joshua’s island, so his child didn’t just watch his dad loot a corpse. Gordon probably should have thought about that before he started messing with the suit. But he’s close enough now that he can hear Benrey and Joshua chattering, their voices rising and falling as they presumably continue to jump on the bounce-pad. 

“Cowboys twenty-seven, cowboys twenty-eight, cowboys twenty-nine, cowboys thirty, cowboys thirty-one...” Joshua is chanting, spaced out far enough that he’s probably counting out his jumps.

Benrey seems to be doing the same thing, but in an even more unorthodox manner, since all Gordon can hear of his voice is a monotone litany of “Question mark, exclamation point, question mark, exclamation point, question mark, exclamation point…” His words are closer together, suggesting one statement is at the apex of each jump and one is when his feet hit the bounce-pad, and Gordon has no idea which is which. He probably doesn’t want to know.

“Aeiou,” Benrey says.

“Ay-oo!” Joshua repeats.

With the voices of his son and his...eldritch-entity-slash-alien friend-person in his ears, Gordon takes a running leap for the next asteroid, delighted at how much more comfortable his feet suddenly are. Unfortunately, that means he’s kicked off harder than he expected to and has sent himself soaring over the next island as if from his own bounce-pad, barreling toward the rim of Joshua’s island at a dangerous speed.

His chest hits the edge of the island and he slings both arms forward, scrabbling for as much of a grip as he can with one hand and kicking the toes of both boots into the rough texture of the cliff edge. Then Benrey is there, one hand under Gordon’s right armpit and the other pulling at his left arm, still carefully avoiding the inflamed gun junction even at a moment like this. Gordon wedges his boots in and pushes up, sending both of them sprawling onto the green-gray ground. 

For a second or two, Benrey is underneath Gordon, the firm planes of his security guard uniform caged in by Gordon’s legs, and it could almost be a moment of some kind. But then Joshua shouts “DAD!” in a worried voice and hits the bounce-pad at an angle to launch himself in their direction. But he’s six, and trajectory is a bit beyond his grip, and he’s too high, he’s going to go over their heads, he’s _going to go over the edge_ -

Benrey moves like silk in water, rolling Gordon off himself and rising up like a wave in one swift motion, suddenly seven, ten, twelve feet tall and reaching out with an elongated arm to pluck Joshua out of the air. He spins on his heels and slings Joshie around like a little moon in orbit to reduce his momentum before he shrinks back down to his normal size and plops a stunned Joshua next to a shocked Gordon.

“Gotta watch out for the edge, little gamer,” Benrey says vaguely as he crouches down. “Can’t, uh, can’t clip through the map. No speedrunning allowed.”

“Aw, man,” Joshua says, apparently put out by that. “Wow, Dad, is your arm okay?”

“Nope,” Gordon says, and sits up enough to tug Joshua against his left side with his good arm, which is shaking a little after seeing his son nearly careen into the terrifying empty void of space. “Definitely not.”

“It’s bleeding,” Joshua says, reaching out to poke at the rivulets of blood trickling down the gun barrels.

“Yep, we’re ignoring that,” Gordon says cheerily, grabbing his son’s hand and squeezing it before he can touch his grubby little fingers to the biohazard that his limb is turning into. “Hey, how many cowboy bounces did you do?”

Joshua perks up at that, grinning up at him. “Ninety-eleven!”

Gordon chuckles weakly. “That’s... I don’t think that’s a real number, buddy. But good job. That’s a lot.”

“Now ask me,” Benrey says.

“What? No -”

“Ask me how many, uh, how many cowboy bounces I did.”

“You - fine. How many cowboy bounces did you do, Benrey?”

“Dunno,” he shrugs. “Wasn’t keeping count.”

“Then _why did you_ \- ugh, never mind.” Gordon drops his head and starts to bring his arm up to adjust his glasses, but it’s the wrong arm, and he aborts that motion as quickly as he can, grimacing at the shock of pain that radiates through his elbow. Luckily Joshua is poking at the gritty Xen-grime that’s lodged under the fingernails of his other hand, and doesn’t see his expression.

“Hey, uh, that shouldn’t be all, shouldn’t be flopping around like that,” Benrey says. “Why is...you should have uh, a sling or something.”

Gordon twitches manically and only just avoids making eye contact, glaring viciously over Benrey’s shoulder instead as he retorts, “yeah, man, that would be great, but I don’t _have_ anything _like that_. I haven’t seen any medkits around, have you?”

“I have a dinosaur bandaid!” Joshua says cheerfully, holding up his arm to show the elbow that Benrey healed the day before. He still got a fun bandaid for being good and holding still - and so he could show his friends at school how tough he was.

Gordon can’t help but smile genuinely at that. “Thanks, buddy, but that one’s already used. And besides, I need a bit more than a bandaid - Benrey, what are you doing?”

“Huh?” The guard looks up awkwardly, arms half out of the security vest. “Oh, there’s uh, there’s medical stuff in these. I don’t need it, so, uh, Gordon Weakman can use it.”

He holds out the black vest, but Gordon just glares at it. 

“How is this supposed to help, exactly?”

Benrey shakes the vest, and it rattles slightly. “Just...just put it on please? Please for Benrey?”

“What the -” Gordon remembers Joshua, “ - _heck_ am I supposed to do with -”

Joshua leans forward and scoops the vest out of Benrey’s hand. “I’ll help, Dad!”

Outnumbered two to one, Gordon sighs and lets Joshua help him into the vest. Once his arms are through and Joshua has carefully zipped it up all the way, Benrey shuffles closer and mutters, “Let me just - careful with the, the eye thing, I’m just gonna move this.” Then he picks up the gun arm and raises it level with Gordon’s chest, tucking it against the vest and prying at what Gordon thought was a pocket, but turns out to be several long straps all folded up. Benrey deftly twists them around and over some tie-down points on the vest’s shoulders, gently tightens the straps, then leans back and gingerly lets go of the gun barrel. 

It drops half an inch or so, but the straps catch it, and the way Benrey tightened them means it’s secure against his chest and surprisingly comfortable. Gordon blinks down at the makeshift sling.

“Huh, that’s actually...that looks like it’ll work really well. Thanks, man.”

“It’s still bleeding,” Joshua interjects mulishy. He looks up at Benrey, who stares blankly back at his accusing little eyes. “Why don’t you make it stop bleeding?”

Benrey’s face crumples. “I, um…I’m not, I, uh...” his eyes flick to the side, then back to Joshua’s frown. From what Gordon can see under the rim of the helmet, his pupils are contracted to tiny anxious pinpricks again.

In the face of Joshua’s imminent discovery that the adults in his life cannot, in fact, solve every problem, Gordon panics a little. 

“It’s because I don’t have my passport,” he blurts out, and then cringes internally as both Benrey and Joshua turn to look at him. He smiles roughly down at Joshie and squeezes his shoulder, bouncing him a little. “Yeah, you know, gotta have your passport for the sweet voice to work. Keeps it...legitimate.”

 _Well_ , he thinks as Benrey’s pupils blow out again until his irises are reduced to a thin ring of yellow, _that’s gonna bite me in the ass for the next few months_. And then he realizes he’s meeting Benrey’s eyes just as his perception skews again, the surrounding nebula bursting into polychromatic blurs as the islands around them warp and twist and multiply and _sing_ -

Benrey looks down at Joshua with a shark-toothed grin and Gordon sways backward, blinking.

“Yeah, little gamer-dude, you got your, uh, you got credentials? Are you allowed to be here? You get your passport stamped at the...the, uh, sleepy-time train station?”

“Yeah!” Joshua giggles, and, wait, _what_?

Gordon stares as Joshua reaches into the pocket of his pajama pants and pulls out a brown leather bifold, embossed with some complicated seal that Gordon doesn’t get a good look at. Joshua gives it to Benrey, who flips through it and grins again. Something about him seems to relax as he gives the bifold back.

“Wow, good job, better than Cringeman Faildad could, uh, could do,” he says, smirking in Gordon’s direction.

“Okay, number one, are you ever going to use my actual name? And number two, what the fu- _heck_ is that?” He looks down at his son, who smiles up at him and pockets the bifold. “Joshua, I’ve never seen that - that wallet-thing in my life, where did you get it?”

“I dunno,” Joshua shrugs. “I guess I always have it. Can I go back to the jumpy-jump?”

“To the - you’ve always -” Gordon sighs, defeated. “You know what, yeah buddy, you can go back to the bounce-pad. Just be careful of the edge!” The last part is said with increasing volume as Joshua wiggles out from under his arm and races back to the bounce-pad.

“Okay,” Gordon turns to Benrey, who is in the act of loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. “Can you try, again, to explain what the fuck is going on? Why is Joshua here? Why does Joshua have some sort of _dream passport_? What are you _doing_?”

“Whuh? Oh, uh, little gamer’s right,” Benrey says, rocking forward on his knees and reaching into a pocket of the vest - that Gordon is wearing on his actual body right now, thank you, what happened to personal space - and pulls out a handful of gauze pads and a roll of what looks like vet tape. “You’re still bleeding, and I can’t...I’m not, uh…” He stills, then shakes his head and rips open two of the gauze pad packets at once. “I gotta fix you up.”

It only takes a minute or so before Gordon’s arm-gun is wiped clean of blood and the area where metal meets skin is padded and secured with lime green vet wrap. He even manages to wrap the whole arm without removing the straps that are keeping it supported in the makeshift sling. Gordon’s pretty sure he saw a few extra hands coming out of Benrey’s arms during that process, but he stopped asking questions about stuff like that months ago.

When he’s done, Benrey sits back on his heels, one hand still on Gordon’s elbow as he surveys his work. Then he glances down and snorts.

“Nice kicks, Feetman. Didja find a, uh, a Hot Topic on the way over? You’re a, uh, hashtag mood. Hashtag work. Didja steal those, huh? Gordon Stealman?”

“I _will_ punch you,” Gordon says tiredly, even though he won’t. “And you know I pulled them off a dead body.”

Benrey’s mouth twists and he sits back down cross-legged. If Gordon looks over him he can see Joshua on the bounce-pad again, counting up from “cowboys ninety-eleven” (which is followed, apparently, by “cowboys ninety-twelve” - what is the school system coming to?).

“Yeah,” Benrey says quietly. “Yeah this is, uh, pretty messed up.”

“Can you explain it to me?” Gordon asks, as gently as he can considering the circumstances.

Benrey’s mouth works and then he turns his head and sings out an ascending tone of sweet voice in blues and grays and violets. Gordon watches the spheres rise, fall, and fade away, and is not enlightened in the slightest. But even though this is a weird and stressful situation, it’s not being-attacked-by-aliens-and-the-entirety-of-the-United-States-military-at-the-same-time weird and stressful, so he can deal with it. Not to mention the fact that over the last month or so, Gordon’s started to realize that he and Benrey might really actually be kind of friends, which is...bizarre, since the guy tried to kill him and the rest of the Science Team - but since they did _actually_ kill Benrey in return, maybe they’re all even.

Either way, what it all comes down to is that Gordon has gotten to know Benrey, and he can wait for him to find his words.

There are a few more bursts of sweet voice of varying shades, but then Benrey’s looking distressed and his fingertips are curling into claws, so Gordon reaches out with his good hand and wraps it over the closest set of talons.

Benrey freezes, then blows out a breath of air that is empty of colored orbs. “S’like I said, uh, earlier. Before. Sleep mode is dumb, it doesn’t do anything, and I don’t need to sleep - I don’t sleep.”

“Okay,” Gordon says after a moment of silence. “So what is this? Where are we? Take your time,” he adds quickly as Benrey’s hand tightens in his.

“Sleep mode doesn’t do anything,” Benrey repeats after a moment. “F’you wanna install updates, you, uh, you gotta hit restart. Reset. Download updates and fix...fix problems. Troubleshoot shit and uh...stuff.”

Gordon absentmindedly rubs his thumb over Benrey’s claws as he thinks, watching over Benrey’s shoulder as Joshua hits two thousand cowboy bounces. Of course Benrey’s looking at this in computer terms, but Gordon’s not sure how that translates - neither of them are a computer, or even have computer parts. (He’s not counting the gun, because that’s not there in real life anymore.) Coomer could probably explain what’s going on better, but Coomer’s not here.

Actually, there’s an idea. “Hey Benrey,” Gordon says blandly as he watches Joshua over Benrey’s shoulder, “I’m having trouble with this. How do you think Dr. Coomer would explain this situation to me?”

Benrey’s brow furrows, then he peers out over the nebula and scattered drifting asteroids. “Why don’t you, uh, why don’t you ask him?”

“...What?” Gordon says blankly, a beat behind the conversation as Joshua attempts to do a backflip and fails miserably, but manages to turn it into a bellyflop that still bounces him back up into the cowboys three thousands. Then his brain catches up. “Wait, _what_?” 

“Hello Gordon!” Dr. Coomer says cheerily as he lands with a brisk thud on the island.


	3. Moving On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're just...they're literally just talking. For this whole chapter. I am so sorry, I have lost control of my life, this fic was supposed to be SHORT and yet. Here we are. Thank you all for your patience, and for reading. Like, comment, rate and subscribe - or whatever those crazy kids on YouTube say these days. Hopefully the next chapter will be up sooner than this one was.

“Dr. Coomer?!” Gordon yelps as Coomer steps forward and collapses soundlessly into a cross-legged position next to him and Benrey.

“Hello, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer says again. “Hello, Security Chief Boper!”

“Hey, uh, you got credentials? Passport, or...can I see it please?”

“Hang on -” Gordon starts to say, but Dr. Coomer is already handing Benrey a brown leather bifold with an embossed seal on the front. Once again, Gordon can’t get a good look at it as Benrey flips it open, tilts it, glances from it to Dr. Coomer, gnaws vaguely at a corner - _what the fuck_ \- and then hands it back.

“All present and accounted for, you’re, uh, good to go,” Benrey says.

“What the fuck,” Gordon says.

“Hello, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer says.

“Yes, hi, hello Dr. Coomer,” Gordon stutters, then pulls himself together. Just a dream, it’s just a dream, he just has to find out how to get out. “Can...you...help explain what’s going on?”

“Of course! That’s why I’m here!” Dr. Coomer exclaims cheerily. “I am a pseudo-subconscious manifestation of your currently-conjoined minds!”

Gordon blinks at him for a moment as Benrey picks at his teeth with one sharp claw, and behind him, Joshua bounces and bounces and bounces.

“You’re saying you’re not real,” Gordon says slowly. 

“Correct! Or rather, I am as real as you want me to be. I am a vessel through which Benrey can explain certain concepts in words that make sense to you, and vice versa, if necessary.”

“Because I don’t understand the sweet voice.” Gordon can feel his frustration rising again, and turns his head to glare at Benrey. “How am I supposed to learn if you never _teach_ me?”

And then he’s falling, the island kaleidoscoping around him as brand new colors manifest at the edges of his vision and he starts to hear an unearthly music growing louder and louder -

“Look out, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer shouts, and Gordon whips his head around to stare at him instead. He looks strangely flat and washed out in relation to the hurricane of color and light and sound that Gordon’s world had been just a moment before.

“Okay, that,” he pants, and flaps his good hand weakly in Benrey’s direction. “What is with _that_?”

Benrey sings out a low mournful tone of sickly greens and toxic purples. Dr. Coomer smooths his moustache with one hand, then interlaces his fingers and leaves them in his lap.

When he speaks next, it is slower and more halting than Gordon has ever heard Dr. Coomer speak. Even when driven half-mad by the accumulated power of his slain clones, he had always sounded sure of himself. But now, he sounds almost like...well, like Benrey, if Benrey had a much better vocabulary.

“I...am afraid there are some concepts which I will not be able to...translate properly,” he begins, frowning a little. “But I shall endeavor to do my best. This is not a dream, not...exactly. It is more like...well, I suppose you could call it a sort of interdimensional plane. It is real, and it is not. You are here, and you are not. I daresay if I was in your apartment right now, I would see you both sleeping in your beds!”

“I sleep on the couch, bro,” Benrey says, almost too quickly.

“Ah, of course, my mistake! As I was saying, both of your minds are here, but not your physical selves - or rather, not _your_ physical self, Gordon. Benrey is, well, a bit of a different story.”

“And that means what, exactly?” Gordon asks.

Benrey shrugs and fiddles with one rolled-up sleeve. “M’not human, bro. I told you. I keep telling you.”

Gordon rubs at his flannel-clad thigh to keep from reaching over and shaking him. “Yeah, man, and I get that, I really, really do. You’ve got glowing eyes and you sing colored balls of light and you can shapeshift, I _know_ you’re not human. That doesn’t really give me any hint as to what you actually _are_.”

There is a moment of silence, and then Dr. Coomer says “I don’t think we can answer that,” and “maybe that’s not as important as-” but somehow, he says both things at the same time. And as he does, he seems to rip in two, twinned from the waist up but offset by only a few degrees, as if two video game characters are trying to occupy the same space in a poorly-made map. 

Gordon physically flinches back, and Benrey says “oh hey, that’s...that hasn’t happened before.”

“Well, before it was just you here,” both Dr. Coomers say. “Now that there are two minds existing in this place, you both have the power to make changes and influence projections.” By the time he finishes speaking, he is one person again. It shouldn’t be as unsettling as it is, but for some reason, seeing Dr. Coomer subjected to the same strange rules by which Benrey usually operates - namely, no logical rules at all - is deeply disturbing to Gordon.

He should really work on his acceptance of weird happenings in his life.

“Does that mean I should be able to change how things are in this...dreamscape?” He narrowly avoids calling it a nightmare, but he sees Benrey flinch very slightly at the pause anyway, and wonders if he could tell what Gordon was trying not to say. 

“Hello, Gordon! That is correct!”

“Then why is my arm a gun again? Still? And why is it so...so fucked up? Why can’t I change it?”

Dr. Coomer looks deeply sorrowful at this. “Unfortunately, Gordon, your puny human brain is incapable of perceiving the threads of non-dimensional unreality you would need to manipulate in order to do so without adequate training.”

“Are you saying Benrey got _training_?”

Benrey snorts. “Did you get training in how to breathe, bro? How to walk? S’what I am. I can just do this shit, it’s easy.” He picks mulishly at a loose thread on his sleeve, pale orange and yellow sweet voice leaking out between his teeth. “Don’t know why the arm thing didn’t work, though, I should’ve been able to, uh, change that back to...not being all, all gross and meaty.”

“So what’s the deal with that?” Gordon asks Dr. Coomer.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything that neither of you know,” he replies pensively. “I can only speculate that since both of you can influence things, Gordon subconsciously reacted to the environment he - you - found yourself in. Benrey pulled the gun off, expecting it to be a clean, healed stump underneath, as it currently is. And it would have been if you were a projection, but your human mind reacted by implanting what would have happened had the arm-gun been literally ripped off in, as you say, real life.”

“As I say,” Gordon muttered to himself. “Why do I even have the fucking gun in the first place?”

“Savepoint,” Benrey says unhelpfully, then blows sickly green bubbles when Gordon glances at him out of the corner of his eye. 

“And what exactly does that mean?”

“Gotta reset to stay healthy, bro. Like you sleep to stay healthy, otherwise you go crazy manic n’then turn into a zombie, until…” He trails off, his mouth twisting a little.

“Until you hit me with the sweet voice and knock me out, I know. That was _one time_ , man, Joshie was sick and I couldn’t sleep in case he needed me!”

“Cringe baby was fine,” Benrey says vaguely, his mind seemingly elsewhere. “Kept an eye on him. And you. An’ it wasn’t just that time - with the voice, I mean. I use it a lot to help you sleep and hurt less and stuff.”

Gordon sighs. “And I appreciate it, I really do, but I feel like we’re getting off-topic.”

“Actually, Gordon,” Dr. Coomer interrupts, “this is very on-topic. We may have just discovered the reason you’re here. But back to your original question! This projection is the last frame of reference Boper has of you before your cohabitation. When you last interacted on Xen - when we all did - you had your arm-gun. Since we’ve gone all the way back, you have it again!”

“That’s not very clear at all, you know,” Dr. Coomer says suddenly, and then he doubles again. This time the two Coomers are offset by about eight inches. If one was red and one was blue and he had the right glasses, Gordon could be seeing them in 3D - but somehow, illogically, they are already in 3D. Horrifying, visually-confusing 3D. Focus, Gordon.

The Coomer that’s closer to Gordon is continuing to speak, and his voice sounds smoother, a little less stilted, more like it’s been since Black Mesa now that he’s allowed himself to relax a little, no longer forced to be on high alert 24/7.

“The thing about not being human is that Benrey doesn’t die, no matter what happens to his current physical body. You’ve seen him get crushed by a door, shot full of bullets, eaten by giant pigeons -”

“They didn’t see that one,” the Coomer slightly closer to Benrey says. Benrey looks a bit embarrassed. Gordon really, really wishes he saw that one.

“My mistake!” The closer Coomer chirps. “Anyway, recursive immortality relies on reverting back to a prior state. Energy is saved by utilizing whatever raw material is left over to rebuild. This can sometimes be a...well, a messy process - so one finds oneself casting a rather wide net.”

“And that’s the issue,” the more distant Coomer says - though they seem to be gradually merging back together as if sliding on very slow rails, so he’s not much more distant. They only have three eyes now, the middle eyes having merged as well as the moustaches, but they still have two mouths, and Gordon has to turn his head slightly to watch another flock of weird manta-ray-bird-things sail by to keep from getting queasy.

“Benrey’s body is reading yours as part of it,” the freshly-united Dr. Coomer says, as if that makes any sense at all. “Hello, Gordon!”

Gordon stares. He opens his mouth, then closes it. He rubs his lower lip with his good hand, but stops when he catches Benrey staring out of the corner of his eye.

“Okay,” he says once he’s quieted down the internal screaming, and tilts his head toward Benrey. “Are you saying you’re trying to...what, to _absorb_ me?”

“M’not _trying_ to, bro,” Benrey says plaintively. “It’s just happening. I have to keep thinking not to, an’ thinking all the time’s fuckin’ exhausting...dunno how you do it.”

“Do you not normally think -” Gordon pauses, then blinks and says, “no, you know what, that tracks.” 

“S’the problem with the, uh, the eye thing,” Benrey continues. “Distracting.”

Gordon has to pause again at that, then a slow grin grows on his face. “Are you saying you get lost in my eyes, _bro_? Do you find yourself ‘drowning in the emerald sea?’” (That one wasn’t him, at least. His exes have always waxed poetic at the shockingly bright color of his eyes. Sometimes he wonders if that’s all people remember him for - but hey, if it is, at least it’s something good.)

Then Benrey drags his thought process to a screeching halt by muttering “Maybe.”

“Um,” Gordon says, thrown off. Benrey won’t make eye contact - of course not, that’s the whole problem, but still. He decides to unpack that statement later. “So what happens if you, um, stop...thinking about it?”

Benrey shrugs and says “This,” then gazes past Gordon with a glassy expression.

Nothing happens.

Dr. Coomer is still smiling. Joshua is still bouncing.

“Uh -” Gordon starts to say, and then the universe tears open.

Last summer, before his latest interest in cowboys took over, Joshua had gotten hooked on astronomy and gone on a rabid binge of any data he could find - he cleared the library shelves of anything with stars on the cover, he watched countless episodes of _Cosmos_ even though he couldn’t have understood a quarter of it, he begged Gordon to watch YouTube videos on star formations and black holes, and on several occasions, when work allowed, he’d managed to convince Gordon to drive out into the desert to stargaze. He’d also convinced Gordon to download a star map app on his phone and used it to point out various constellations and planets - but Gordon always found himself staring at the pale band of the Milky Way, struggling to see the depth of it, the distance. He could _understand_ that Earth was closer to the edge of the galaxy, and the Milky Way was the center of the galaxy, with the rest of the disk spread out on the other side, but he couldn’t _see_ it, not really.

Now he can. He can see everything, and it’s...incredible. Impossible. There are currents of lights in colors he’s never seen before and has no names for that twist and whirl around him, and hidden in their wild motion are melodies, achingly unearthly tunes, sounds, voices, thundering roars, and under it all lies the ragged hiss of background radiation, the last echoes of the formation of the universe. And, chiming like bells, sparkling like glitter, sharp-scented as mint, there are other echoes of the formations of other universes, parallel dimensions - and one of them tastes-smells-feels familiar. 

Moving both glacially slow and light-speed swift, Gordon turns his perception toward that familiar thread and finds himself looking-hearing-smelling a roiling mass of light and color that wears a ragged, oil-slick dark layer of hide that’s shot through with slits that dilate and contract like pupils, like heartbeats. And both terrifyingly and comfortingly, Gordon can feel-taste-hear a similar motion in himself. He turns his perception to his own body-shape-mass-being and finds himself covered in a gossamer-thin layer of the oil-slick darkness, shot through with cobalt blue and teal-green threads like veins that expand and contract with every heartbeat, and all of which are reaching out like creeping vines turning toward the sun - but in this case, their sun is the writhing mass of being that must be Benrey.

As soon as he returns his regard to that, he can feel the pull, the artificial ache of dismemberment, and now the fear is growing, because in that being’s perception, he feels like a limb, like a severed arm that wants only to reconnect. He doesn’t feel like a person. But he can’t fight the pull - it’s far too strong, and he’s beginning to lose the thread of himself. He’s beginning to lose his thoughts, his individuality, his sense of self, as he finds his perception following the flow of light toward that great, heaving darkness with the all-seeing eyes -

“So, uh, yeah,” Benrey says, and Gordon overbalances and falls flat on his face.

It’s the shock of landing fully on his bandaged arm that brings him solidly back to himself more than anything else. For a moment the pain drives everything else out of his head. Forget being one with the universe - there is no universe, only agony, and between that and the knock to his head caused by not having both arms to catch himself with, Gordon blacks out for a second.

He comes to half a breath later, gritting his teeth to keep from screaming. There are two pairs of hands on him, and it takes him a moment to remember Dr. Coomer - his first thought is that Benrey is just growing extra limbs again.

“Easy does it, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer says.

“Shit shit shit fuck I'm sorry, are you okay?” Benrey says. The concern in his voice is so raw Gordon would feel touched, if he could feel anything besides pain right now. Instead, he lets their guiding hands help him back up into a sitting position and struggles not to whimper.

He resettles his miraculously unbroken glasses on his nose, then wipes the weird Xen-dirt from his face and chest and pats Dr. Coomer’s supporting arm weakly, taking several deep breaths before speaking.

“Thanks, Dr. Coomer,” he finally says, then whacks Benrey’s arm with the back of his hand. “And you...is that what you see _all the time_?”

Benrey shakes his head so hard his helmet wobbles. “No way, bro, that’s just, like, reset space. Like...dreams, I guess. Things are thinner, n’that’s not even my, my final form, it’s not - I’m not -” He pauses and visibly swallows back some sweet voice, then gives Dr. Coomer a pleading look.

“No, don’t bother, it’s fine,” Gordon interrupts, waving his hand. He’s got a headache growing behind his eyesockets. “So that explains the eye thing. But it doesn’t explain why I’m here, or why your body is apparently trying to fucking _absorb_ me.”

“S’the sweet voice,” Benrey says, appearing relieved to be able to answer something. One of his hands is still on Gordon’s left arm, and his thumb rubs absently against Gordon’s bicep. “I used it to help you sleep last night, and your arm was hurting earlier, so I used the heal beam to help that too...and I guess it builds up.”

Gordon blinks, remembering the two colors of the veins of light that had seemed to be reaching from him to Benrey - cobalt blue and teal green.

“But why hasn’t this happened before? Like you said, you use the sweet voice all the time to help me sleep.” Neither of them mention that the reason for that is stopping the nightmares that Black Mesa Benrey features in more often than not.

“Haven’t done a reset, though,” Benrey says. “Gotta update..update software, run a debug…”

Unsurprisingly, Gordon is still confused. “And _why_ does that affect me?”

“Hello, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer says brightly. “Remember, one must cast a wide net!”

“Yeah, I have no idea what that means,” Gordon tells him.

“Sometimes death is messy, Gordon, however temporary it may be! When you are what Benrey is, there may be bits spread over a wide area. Think of a bagged turkey dropped from a great height!”

“Yep, okay, got it, thanks,” Gordon says, trying not to picture the bagged turkey with Benrey’s face, trying not to think about the sound the door made when it came down on Benrey’s torso, that sickening wet crunch - 

Oh, this is going to create a whole new slew of nightmares, he just knows it.

“Well, Gordon, your whole apartment is smaller than the radius of recovery! Since you were chock-full of Benrey’s balls -”

“Please don’t say it like that,” Gordon mumbles, wincing as Benrey chortles.

“- you felt enough like part of Benrey’s body that his reset tried to pull you in.” Dr. Coomer continues, unfazed. “And since you are not, in fact, a severed limb or chunk of viscera, but an individual mind, you were transferred here for targeted reabsorption. Normally that happens with, say, internal organs after all wounds are closed, when certain things must be manually inserted via various -”

“Okay!” Gordon says loudly. “Okay, I think...I think I finally get it. I mean, not really, because this is _insanely_ fucking weird, but it at least makes...some sort of sense.” He takes a deep breath and straightens up, pulling out of the protective hunch he’s been holding around his injured arm.

“So...how do I get out? Do I have to like, I dunno, die or something?” His eyes stray to the edge of the cliff, to the varicolored nebula and the empty space below.

Benrey’s hand tightens on his arm.

“Of course not, my good bitch!” Dr. Coomer says, as if it should be obvious. “If you die in the dream, you die in real life. That’s inception, Gordon!”

“I’m...pretty sure it’s not,” Gordon says, staring at him. “Wait, like the movie? No, that’s - it’s definitely not.”

“If you say so,” Dr. Coomer shrugs. “But luckily, when you fell on your face like a big baby, you passed out for a moment and the connection between you and Security Chief Boper was briefly severed! So now we know you just need to lose consciousness here to wake up in your own body!”

“Oh, _now_ you know? You didn’t before?” Gordon says incredulously.

“Bro, this is all new for me, too,” Benrey says sullenly. “No one’s ever come here before - no one real, at least. They don’t count,” he adds, nodding at Dr. Coomer, who smiles benignly back, then turns to Gordon. 

“Unfortunately, Gordon, you will lose your fashion accoutrements when you wake up. Oh, and they all go together so well! You truly know how to accessorize!”

Gordon stares at Dr. Coomer, then looks down at what he’s currently wearing. Orange and black HEV boots with red flannel pajama pants tucked into them, a raggedy white t-shirt under Benrey’s black security vest, his gun-arm strapped in and wrapped in lime-green vet wrap - he knows he certainly paints a picture right now, but he’s not sure it can be called anything close to “fashion.”

But he’ll be polite this time. “Thanks, Dr. Coomer...I, uh, appreciate it. Your, uh, bloody labcoat is...nice, too.” Then he frowns down at the boots again. 

“Hang on...if I’m supposed to be Benrey’s memory from Xen, why wasn’t I in the HEV suit when I got here?”

Dr. Coomer laughed. “Would you want to be wearing it again?”

“Fuck no,” Gordon says. “That goddamn thing’s so fucking uncomfortable - oh.”

“It looks like you did change something after all!” Dr. Coomer says happily, and that reminds Gordon of a thought that's been niggling at the back of his battered and confused mind.

“Why did you want to reset all the way back to Xen, anyway?” Gordon says slowly, looking down at Benrey’s hand and feeling something unhappy welling in the pit of his stomach. “Did I...did we do something wrong, that you’d want to forget everything since this -”

“Whuh? No no no,” Benrey says quickly, squeezing Gordon’s arm and bringing his other hand up to grip his opposite shoulder. “I don’t forget, it’s a, uh, body-only reset, otherwise I could get stuck dying again in the same way over and over and, and over. If I didn’t remember.”

That makes sense. “Okay...so you’ve spent months living in my apartment and you haven’t once made another save? Savepoint? I’ve seen you play video games, buddy, that’s not how you roll.”

“No, I have, I just...uh…” Benrey’s words trail off into a stream of pink and blue orbs, and Gordon twitches reflexively to avoid them, but they all float upward soon after leaving Benrey’s mouth. 

Huh. Gordon is sure he’s seen a similar color and behavior of sweet voice in the apartment when Benrey watches him with Joshua, or when Gordon brings him new clothes he saw in Goodwill that reminded him of Benrey, or when they’re playing farming video games together at two in the morning...

“What Boper is trying to say -” Dr. Coomer starts, but Benrey whips toward him and half-slings a panicked hand out in his direction, making an incoherent “no-uhh!” sound as he does.

“Help me, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer exclaims before he splits in two, then explodes into a cloud of fine pink mist.

What follows is a delicate moment that would be silent were it not for the gentle hissing of very tiny particles of Dr. Coomer raining softly down across a shockingly large area of the island that already contains both Gordon and Benrey, resulting in the pair of them gaining a wet, rosy hue.

“Uh...oops?” Benrey says.

“What,” Gordon replies quietly, “the _absolute fuck_.”


	4. Keep Your Head Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh, look at the time. Hm. Hey, so, uh, remember how in the last chapter's notes, I said something along the lines of "hopefully the next chapter will be posted faster than this one was?" Yeah...me neither. Let's just say I'm sorry for the delay, and move on as better people, together. Good news is, it's NaNoWriMo and I am a nasty cheater who counts all words written for all projects during the month, so this will definitely be updated by, oh, let's say the end of the week.
> 
> I will warn that this chapter gets extra potentially triggery at one point: there is some implied child danger, so if that's going to be an issue for you, please be careful. The tags have been updated accordingly.

Gordon Freeman is dreaming, and it’s a nightmare.

His glasses are covered in tiny droplets of pink and red, and he can feel something slimy slowly sliding down his cheek as he turns his head to look in Benrey’s direction. He doesn’t need to worry about eye contact when he can’t see through his glasses anyway.

“Wow, uh, hey, what - who did that? Who killed this?”

“Benrey, man, I’m gonna -” Gordon says quietly - or starts to say, before he realizes that the pink mist has settled across his lips as well and he doesn’t want to think about what he’s tasting. It doesn’t taste like blood, weirdly enough - dream logic, maybe - and the flavor is something closer to bubblegum. But the bits are warm, and Gordon’s wires are getting crossed, and he cannot deal with this any more, he just _can’t_.

Instead, he clamps his mouth shut, clamps his eyes shut, pulls his knees up as far as they can go without putting undue pressure on the arm-gun bound across his chest, drops his head to press his forehead against his knees, and tugs uselessly at his hair with his free hand, his breaths coming short and unsteady through his nose as he struggles to stay present. The blood is pounding in his ears and all he can hear is a static rushing, the rasping of his breathing and the empty hum of space all around him. 

Eventually, he realizes there is a weight across his shoulders and back, and though it’s not exactly emitting warmth, it’s trapping his own warmth like a blanket. He’s dozed off leaning against Benrey on the couch enough times to recognize the feeling, and as he struggles to come back to himself, he realizes there’s an uneven vibration - Benrey is half-draped over his back, doing his best to wrap completely around Gordon, and he’s talking.

That in itself is unusual. Not the Benrey-blanket part, he’s like a cat like that, but the talking part. Normally if Gordon was having a rough time, Benrey would be singing…

Oh, right, of course. Using the sweet voice right now would have uncertain results, and Gordon finds himself a bit charmed by the fact that Benrey is self-aware enough to try his best not to set Gordon off any further with something that has caused him considerable pain in the recent past. 

Tuning back in is hard, but Gordon struggles to force his breathing back down to manageable levels and as he does, he begins to hear Benrey’s voice filtering in.

“...think I got rid of all the, uh, the stuff, so that’s not a thing anymore, an’ I need you to come back, cause this is hard, m’trying to think an’ everything but I don’t know how long I can focus n’I don’t want to break your brain cause I can’t focus on the right stuff…”

Shit, that’s right, Gordon freaking out means that Benrey has to split his attention between comforting him and remembering to not absorb him or whatever. At the thought of being pulled back into that roiling world-between-worlds, Gordon’s chest tightens and he wheezes in a weak breath like he’s sipping air through a straw. He’s panicking, this is _useless_ , he’s fucking up and he doesn’t know how to -

“...stop, stop it, you have to stop, you can change things too and you’re changing too much, you gotta -”

Joshua is screaming. Of course he is, everything is screaming, and Gordon’s brain feels like it’s coming out of his ears, but this - this is different. This is his son, his child, his little baby boy, and he wrenches himself back to clarity through sheer force of will. The mental action leaves him feeling sick and shaky, but that’s similar enough to how he’s been feeling that it all blends together into a general miasma of discomfort, and he spent so much time like that in Black Mesa that it almost feels familiar. And how fucked up is that?

Well, it’s not as fucked up as the sight that greets him when he looks in the direction of Joshua’s bounce-pad. Joshua is silhouetted against the ambient light of the closest nebula, stumbling backward in an attempt to escape the creature advancing on him. There are others climbing over the rocks, heading for both sets of people, but Gordon isn’t interested in the ones advancing on his and Benrey’s position - his eyes are fixed on Joshie as his little boy trips and falls down, suddenly seeming very young, his clothes too big and his feet skidding out of his shoes as he scoots himself backward, wailing wordlessly in fear.

Gordon pauses in his struggle to rise, his perception fragmenting for a moment, but not warping toward Benrey as usual (and since when did kaleidoscopic warping into the sphere of Benrey’s influence become _usual?_ ). Instead, he sees Joshua shift in age, regressing back to toddlerhood, his little bare feet scraping against the rough ground as he tumbles to his feet and staggers toward Gordon, holding out his arms to be picked up.

“Whoa, little dude got tiny,” Benrey says behind Gordon, his voice strained. Gordon doesn’t register it until he’s got Joshie scooped up in his left arm - it isn’t until he pitches frantically to his feet that he realizes there’s no need for haste. The massive headcrab - because of course, of course it is - is frozen in mid-jump, fizzing and glitching in the air. When Gordon spins to look back at Benrey, he sees the other giant headcrabs are just as still, their forms shuddering, but immobile. Benrey is swaying slightly, hands clenched so tightly at his sides that his knuckles are white. There is no sign of the Coomer-cloud of red splatter, and Gordon realizes that his clothes and skin are clean, as well.

Joshie is whining in his grasp, and Gordon shifts him on his hip, wincing when he starts to move his right arm to help adjust the toddler’s weight and realizes - again - that he can’t use it. How does he keep _forgetting_ about that?

“Are you - are we good? Can you, uh, banish the bugaboos please? Yes please? Can’t hold ‘em still forever. Gonna overload like a… wet engine or some shit, I dunno, Tommy’s better at the, uh, metal forks.”

“I think you meant to say ‘metaphors,’ Benrey, bu- but you were actually talking about similes,” Tommy says, from where he is suddenly seated on top of the closest giant headcrab, propeller hat firmly settled on his dark curls, a 32oz gas station Slushee in one hand, wearing his Black Mesa labcoat over his jogging clothes. “Hi, Doc- Mister Freeman!”

“Oh, yeah, thanks Tommy,” Benrey says vaguely, his eyes unfocused. “I definitely meant the sim...smileys…”

It’s too much again, still, somehow. Gordon closes his eyes - _you’re changing too much_ \- squeezes them tightly, and, in his firmest get-your-hand-out-of-the-cookie-jar Dad voice, says “ _Stop_.”

“Bye Tommy,” Benrey says, and when Gordon opens his eyes, Tommy has vanished, along with all the giant headcrabs. Joshie whimpers in his hold, and Gordon looks down at him, only to realize with horror that he’s holding a baby. Joshua now appears to be the same age he was when the picture in Gordon’s Black Mesa locker was taken.

The world warps and Gordon is falling sideways for just a moment, but then Benrey is there to catch his weight and help ease him to the ground. His face is shell-shocked as he looks down at the baby, who is squinching his own little face up unhappily, half-swaddled by the pajama top that fit him so well just a few moments ago.

“Benrey,” Gordon says helplessly, “what the fuck is happening?”

But Benrey is checked out, completely distracted by this new version of Joshua. Slowly, he reaches out and brushes the back of his fingers against Joshie’s chubby baby cheek, flinching away as if shocked when Joshie burbles at him.

“He’s so _little_ ,” he mutters.

“I thought you said he ‘looked a bit shit’,” Gordon says sourly at the top of Benrey’s helmet as he bends over the baby. Benrey jerks up guiltily, looking down at Joshie again and shaking his head.

“No way, bro, that was the picture, it was a bad picture, he’s poggers like this! He’s so _tiny_ …” He trails off into silence, staring at the baby again.

Gordon had forgotten this part of having an infant, the way they suck people’s attention in like a black hole. He wriggles his hand free and snaps his fingers sharply. “Benrey, man, c’mon, _why_ is he tiny? Is he gonna keep regressing, or is this more magic dream mindscape bullshit and I just have to imagine him big again? Cause I gotta tell you, I’m trying, man, and it’s not really working.”

Benrey shrugs. “Dream bullshit, yeah, that’s probably closest. He’s not gonna, like, Benjamin Button his way to disappearing unless you want him to, though. Probably.”

Great, that’s not an image Gordon needed in his head. Change the subject. “So were the giant headcrabs...my fault?” Wait, no, bad subject change, too much guilt.

Benrey looks shifty. “Uh, they’re...that’s...I dunno, I didn’t make ‘em.”

Gordon groans. So they _were_ his fault. And this must be his fault, too, Joshie being a baby again. He feels a pang of nostalgia as he peers down at the round cheeks, the huge eyes, the chubby little fingers. It was only a few years ago that he was this small, but it feels like forever. 

Shit, what if Joshua is stuck inside his baby self and freaking out? “We’re gonna get you back to normal, okay bud?” Gordon says, and gently bounces the infant in his arm.

Benrey looks at him like he’s gone mad. “Bro, it’s...he’s a baby. He can’t understand you.”

“He’s not actually a baby, Benrey, he’s six, and he’s probably confused as hell.”

“Whuh?” Benrey blinks. “This is - this isn’t the real Joshua, this is like Coomer, and the, the headcrabs - it’s not really him. He had his passport, remember?”

Baby Joshie kicks out and shrieks. Gordon flinches and tries to pull the trailing end of the pajama top away from his feet. He remembers that noise, that’s the noise Joshie made when he got hurt, maybe the giant headcrab got him after all, and he can’t use his right hand but his left is supporting Joshie’s head and what if - what if -

“Whoa, chillax, bro, I got it,” Benrey says as he pushes Gordon’s hand gently away and tugs the shirt up a little himself. “You wanna see his feet, Feetman? Lil baby Feetman feets? We can do that, c’mon…”

Gordon’s not sure if he’s speaking so gently for Joshie’s benefit or his, and figures it’s probably the same thing right now. Benrey is careful to only expose Joshua from his knees down, though the kicking makes that a bit hard. And yes, his pudgy little feet are bleeding, just a little, but probably from falling on the rough ground when the giant headcrab was chasing him. The giant headcrab that Gordon dreamed up, Joshie’s own father imagining something to hurt him and then imagining him so small he can’t defend himself, and oh no, Gordon’s spiraling again and didn’t he _just_ do this, why can’t he _stop_ , why is he so _useless_ -

Benrey sings out a burst of teal-green and for a second Gordon forgets what that means for him here. But before his battered brain can catch up enough to panic, Benrey catches the orbs, smushes them into a dripping liquid paste, and rubs it onto Joshie’s feet as well as he can as they flail around. After a moment, he turns his head and sings out more sweet voice, pink and blue and soft dove gray bubbles that stay floating in the air overhead. Joshie goes still and quiet, the pastel hues reflected in his wide eyes. Then he laughs, and reaches for the lights, and Benrey breathes out a sigh of what Gordon realizes is relief before bending over the tiny feet and massaging the liquid sweet voice in while the baby is distracted.

They’re all tangled up, the three of them, Gordon cradling Joshie’s head in his good arm while his little body lays across Gordon’s legs, and Benrey is kneeling on the hard ground, hunched awkwardly over Gordon’s lap to hold Joshie’s feet still as the teal-green healing sweet voice dissolves, leaving behind unblemished skin.

They’re all tangled up in more ways than that. Gordon breathes slowly, measuring his inhales and exhales to the pulsing light of the sweet voice bubbles - and they don’t normally pulse, so that must be something _else_ Benrey did to help him.

They’re _so_ tangled up. “Benrey?” Gordon says quietly, looking down at Joshie’s smiling face. “Why _did_ you want to reset all the way back to this point?”

Benrey goes still. Gordon can’t see his face, just his helmet, and he is very pointedly not looking up. That’s fine. He can hide in whatever way he needs to as long as he actually talks about shit for once.

“I, uh...was trying to check something,” Benrey says, and stops, as if there was any world where that would be a good enough answer.

“What were you trying to check?”

Benrey is still holding Joshie’s feet, one in each hand, and he’s bouncing them slightly one at a time. Joshie giggles, and Benrey breathes in sharply, then exhales sweet voice off to the side. Pastel pink to blue interspersed with pale gray, all soft colors. Then his helmet tilts slightly and Gordon can tell he’s looking sideways at the arm-gun, because the sweet voice changes to mangled reds and blacks, multicolored orbs that bleed and drip into each other. Benrey bumps his helmet against Gordon’s shoulder like a cat, and the sweet voice changes to bright pink that fades into a soft, comforting blue a few shades lighter than the calm-down cobalt blue.

He doesn’t say anything else, but he’s still speaking, in his own way. He’s trying, and Gordon owes it to him to try in return. So he does, staring at the fading colors and struggling to remember what he knows of the sweet voice, from Tommy’s hasty translations in Black Mesa and his more detailed explanations afterward, from Benrey’s own words, from the way certain colors only show up in certain contexts… 

“It’s about feelings, isn’t it?” Gordon says slowly. 

Benrey’s shoulders tense and his outline shudders and blurs for a moment, as if he’s resisting the urge to shapeshift into something that can escape this conversation.

Too bad, this is happening.

“‘M’not used to…” Gordon blinks in surprise. He hadn’t expected Benrey to actually speak voluntarily - he’d thought he would have to drag it out of him. Benrey takes a deep breath, still looking down at baby Joshie, and says clearly, “I’m not used to caring.” Then he slumps a little and mumbles, “Thought something was wrong…”

Gordon stares off into the distance, mind whirling in the normal fashion. A flock of flying manta ray things goes by, followed by a flock of Canada geese. Apparently Gordon’s subconscious is getting more involved in this dreamscape. He’s not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

“Benrey,” he says in the kindest way possible, “are you saying that you tried to reset your brain because you thought that...caring about people...was some sort of mental computer virus?”

Joshie giggles and bats at a lingering pink sweet voice orb. Gordon wishes he could giggle, but knows he can’t or he’ll give in to absolute hysteria. He’d wanted to say something other than “caring about people” but he’s pretty sure if he uses that word he’ll break Benrey’s brain and then Gordon will get absorbed into some sort of transdimensional hellsphere, and he can’t deal with that right now.

“Uh,” Benrey says after a few moments, and doesn’t say anything else.

“Okay,” Gordon takes pity on him. “Let’s...we can deal with the whys later. Can we - did you figure out a way for me to go back? Falling asleep, right?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Benrey says, sounding relieved. “When you knocked yourself out earlier you, uh, dipped out for a sex - _sec_ \- a second.”

Gordon snorts. “Okay, cool. Let’s do that. I’ve freaked out enough in the last...hour? Two hours? Falling asleep should be easy.”

Only it isn’t. Gordon allows Benrey to help him move himself and baby Joshie over to a nice rock that he can lean up against, and he settles in and leans his head back and closes his eyes...but after a moment the dull red of the inside of his eyelids is shot through with threads of blue and teal green that twist and stretch and pull him forward, toward -

“Benrey!” Gordon barks, his eyes snapping open to see Benrey jump and look over in his direction, eyebrows up in surprise.

Joshie fusses at the sudden movement and loud noise, whimpering on Gordon’s lap. “Shit, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Gordon says down to him, feeling guilty, and feeling guiltier when he looks up at Benrey’s confused expression. “That...wasn’t you, was it?”

“Whuh?”

“I was getting pulled in again.”

“Wha - no - bro, that wasn’t me, I’m thinkin’ really hard here!” Benrey sounds honestly upset, and Gordon feels like an asshole.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, it must have been...oh, I don’t know what it was. Shit. It’s fine.” He takes a deep breath and leans back again. “Let me just… forget it. I’m going to sleep.”

But it happens again within sixty seconds of him closing his eyes, and Gordon jerks up, panicked. “I don’t think I can sleep,” he says. “I think I’ve - I’ve been here too long, or something. I don’t think this is gonna work.”

He’s starting to get scared, but then Benrey scoots over and presses a hand against his chest, reaching down with the other to cup Joshie’s head, reaching up with a third to clasp Gordon’s shoulder, wrapping a fourth hand around the back of Gordon’s neck and tugging him forward until his forehead is pressed against the smooth shell of Benrey’s helmet.

“Whoa, bro, easy,” Benrey’s saying, and he’s carefully not making eye contact even as he’s got Gordon as wrapped up as he can be. The contrast is amusingly endearing, enough that it helps Gordon get a hold of himself. He takes a deep breath and lets it out shakily.

“Hey, uh...I think I got an idea, but I don’t…” Benrey pauses, then continues. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but I dunno how much longer I can… I mean - okay.” He breathes in, presses his head harder against Gordon’s, then leans back so Gordon can see his face, his eyes fixed over Gordon’s shoulder.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

Gordon breathes in hard, shocked. _Does_ he trust Benrey? He stares at the face of the person who poked and prodded and harassed him through Black Mesa and sees the dead-eyed gaze that’s haunted more than a few of his nightmares. He remembers seeing Benrey shoot countless people, remembers him casually catching pigeons and biting their heads off, sharp teeth glistening with blood. He remembers the absentminded cruelty of Benrey’s constant needling remarks, the inane vapidity with which he had asked about Gordon’s missing arm when it first happened, the way he couldn’t be counted on to show up, or shoot the right people, at any given time. And he remembers Benrey distorted and huge, looming over them all right here on Xen, huge and angry and somehow so hurt, but it didn’t matter, because he was still trying to kill them with an army of skeletons and his own warped form…

But then Gordon hits pause on that, and forces himself to remember the Benrey he’s known these past few months: smaller, quieter, just as strange and alien but all of it less threatening somehow, as if he’s trying so hard to fit into Gordon’s world. He remembers the all-day gaming sessions, waking up in the middle of the night from another nightmare to Benrey blowing blue bubbles over him, making dinner in the kitchen while Benrey stands in front of every single drawer and cabinet he needs to open, watching him cajole Joshua into eating broccoli, catching him teaching Joshua cheat codes and speedrun routes in video games that are way too old for him, and he remembers Joshie falling hard off the monkey bars at the park and wailing for Benrey before Gordon, and how he’s pretty sure Joshie’s wrist had been broken, but then there was a quick burst of vibrant sweet voice and Joshie was sniffling but fine. Gordon remembers Benrey handing Joshua off to him for reassuring cuddles and how his hand had lingered on Joshie’s back as he glanced around to make sure no one had seen the sweet voice, protective and proprietary and worried all at once. 

Benrey after Black Mesa is a different person from Benrey in Black Mesa. He’s trying so hard, every day, and Gordon realizes all at once that he doesn’t know what he would do if he didn’t have Benrey in his apartment, living on his couch and helping with Joshua and soothing nightmares and healing scrapes. The first few months back were such a blur of pain and misery, but now Gordon feels like he can function - like maybe, just maybe, he can make it.

“Fuck,” he says quietly, and Benrey tenses. He hurries to add “I do trust you. I really think I do.”

Benrey blinks and his pupils expand until Gordon can barely see any yellow. He looks shocked, which is fucking sad - has Gordon really been enough of a dick that he thought he wasn’t trustworthy? Granted, Gordon’s only just admitting it to himself right this moment, but he’s left Benrey alone with Joshua multiple times now while running errands. Maybe aliens raise their kids differently, but for Gordon, that’s a big fucking deal. He wouldn’t trust Joshie with Bubby, that’s for sure.

“I trust you, Benrey,” he says again, much firmer this time. “What do you want to do?”

“Whuh, oh, uh,” Benrey fumbles for a moment, then rallies. “I uh...I think I have to use the sweet voice to knock you out.”

Gordon stares at him. “I no longer trust you. What the _fuck_ , that’s what got us here in the first place -”

“No, wait, listen.” Benrey presses one of his hands over Gordon’s mouth, two more moving up to grip his shoulders. “I’m pretty sure I can knock you out before you, like, OD on it and get fuckin’ uhhh...absorbed or whatever. It should be fine.”

Gordon raises one eyebrow as sarcastically as he can, and Benrey drops the hand over his mouth. 

“You’re not sounding very confident about any of this, man,” Gordon says.

“What do you want from me?” Benrey says plaintively. “This has never happened before, I dunno what I’m doing - but I’m pretty sure this’ll work, and I don’t know what else to try. The longer we’re here the harder it is to think, and I’m…” He swallows thickly, then says in a wrenching, ragged voice, “I’m scared of hurting you.”

Well, shit. That reminds Gordon that he’s the one with less to lose, here. If this doesn’t work, they’ll still be stuck here until Benrey loses concentration or something else happens and Gordon gets absorbed into his stupid alien form, and Benrey’s the one who’ll have to live with that, wake up and go back to an empty apartment, or an apartment with Gordon’s catatonic body, maybe, he doesn’t know how this works. And Joshua won’t understand why his dad isn’t waking up, or isn’t coming back, and if there’s a chance to prevent that then of course Gordon has to take it.

“Okay,” Gordon says. “Okay. But, Benrey, if this doesn’t work, you gotta promise me something, man. Promise you’ll take care of Joshie, okay? Take him to Dr. Coomer and Bubby, or Tommy, but don’t leave him alone, please.”

Benrey rears back, shocked. “I wouldn’t leave him!”

“Okay, okay, alright. So if this goes sideways and I'm...gone...you promise me you’ll tell him what happened, or at least make him understand that I’m not coming back, and you’ll make sure he’s taken care of? Doesn’t have to be by you, I can’t ask that of you but...by someone? You’ll make sure he has someone?” Gordon swallows and squeezes the baby in his lap, and the dream-construct version of Joshie burbles up at him. It breaks his heart a little to think about this, to ask this of Benrey, but he has to do it. When it comes to his kid, he has to be a responsible adult and plan for his future, even if he can’t plan for his own.

Benrey’s shaking his head, and Gordon’s not sure what he’s trying to deny.

“Hey,” he says. “Benrey. This is important. Can you promise me that Joshie will be taken care of?”

Benrey goes still, staring down at the infant in Gordon’s lap, one of his hands still cupping the baby’s head. He grows another arm to tuck the pajama-top-turned-blanket up around his chubby little chin, then looks up and nods, staring at Gordon’s chest, his jaw tight and the lines on his face deeper than Gordon’s ever seen them.

“Yeah,” he says roughly. “Yes. I can...I’ll do that.”

Gordon sighs deeply, feeling some primal sense of relief. As long as his child is okay, he can deal with a lot. That was all that kept him going the first few months after Black Mesa, before Benrey showed up - he could barely get out of bed, but he had to take care of Joshua, so he kept doing it, day in and day out.

Gordon should probably go to therapy. After this, he might.

“Okay,” he says, and leans back against the rock. Then he makes a face. “This is gonna be really painful, isn’t it?”

Benrey winces. “Probably, yeah. I’mma try to make it… mix it up extra-strong. Espresso shot of go the fuck to sleep coming right up, hot ‘n’ ready, here we go -”

Gordon is glad for Benrey’s fucking ridiculous manner of speaking, because it means he’s laughing helplessly when the first burst of sweet voice hits him, such a dark shade of blue it’s almost black.

The pain is instant and shockingly excruciating. Gordon had been expecting it to hurt - he remembers what the teal-green heal beam did to the exposed flesh of his arm - but the blue is being shot straight down his throat, and his mouth isn’t open in laughter anymore, he’s screaming, convulsing and involuntarily clutching Joshie tighter, parental instinct telling his body he’s got to protect his baby from whatever’s hurting him - but it’s useless, the thing that’s hurting him is also saving him if it’s working (please, please let it be working), and baby Joshie is screaming again, just like he was before, when he was being attacked by - and yep, of course, here they come, Gordon’s mind lashing out and hurling up fears and terrors that feed into producing the giant headcrabs that are now lunging over the rocks. Gordon couldn’t stop screaming if he tried: the pain is everywhere and all-consuming, he’s never felt this much pain before, and he’s pretty sure he’s seizing or stroking out or something, because this can’t last - this might not be his real body but his mind thinks it is, and his mind can’t take this for much longer.

Although his vision is blurred by tears of pain and something that might be blood, he can still see the expression of agonized determination on Benrey’s face as he continues to beam the blue sweet voice in one continuous stream. Gordon’s field of view is growing smaller, the edges of his vision going dark, but he can still see the first giant headcrab that reaches them rear up, pull one claw-leg back, and punch it straight down, piercing Benrey’s back, bursting out of his chest, and continuing down to spike straight through -

 _Joshua_ -

Gordon feels the pressure of the headcrab’s leg burst out through his own back and grind against the beaten ground he’s convulsing on, but he can’t feel the pain, not on top of everything else. His brain is overloaded, the sweet voice finally working as Benrey coughs out a spray of red mixed in with the blue, black blood dribbling down his chest from where he’s curled over Gordon, both of them stuck like a bug on a pin, and Benrey’s wheezing, staring into the space between them where Joshua - where Joshie -

The headcrab wrenches its leg back with a horrific sound, a burst of red and black blood, and Benrey roars and twists around, his body splitting and contorting in two directions. One half of him turns to face the nearest giant headcrab, along with the others that are still coming over the rocks and climbing up over the edge of the island to reach them, and the other half of him bends over Gordon, still singing blue-black sweet voice - but now there are tears streaking his face and he’s not looking at Gordon, he’s looking down at -

Both of Benrey’s torsos have gaping holes right through the middle, dripping black gore and ichor, and Gordon knows he must look the same, a copy painted in shades of red, and Joshie - 

The larger half of Benrey is growing more arms, reaching out and ripping legs off giant headcrabs, bellowing black-edged red spheres, and the shape of him is dark and shadowy, with yellow slits like eyes opening up on his form, most of them focused outward on the attacking enemies, but some of them are facing backward, looking down at the rest of Benrey, and Gordon, and what’s left of -

 _No_ \- remember it’s not real. He’s dreaming, it’s a fucked-up nightmare, and he’ll wake up soon and Joshua will - Joshua will be - 

Gordon Freeman is dreaming - and then his vision goes dark, and he isn’t anything at all.


	5. Everybody's Looking For Something

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh goodness, I just shouldn't claim to have deadlines. I should know by now that it ain't gonna happen. Still, at least the wait wasn't nearly as long this time. Hopefully this wraps everything up - again, I cannot emphasize enough that this was supposed to be a one-shot of 5,000 words MAX. I don't know where all this plot came from. Hopefully y'all have enjoyed it, cause I sure did.
> 
> P.S. Everything I know about Heavenly Sword came from skimming the Wikipedia article for about thirty seconds. Any mistakes are my own.

Gordon is out of bed and halfway across his dark bedroom before he even realizes he’s awake. For a moment he stands shaking and gasping in the middle of the room, his right arm across his torso, his left hand pressing against the spot on his belly where the giant headcrab’s claw had punched through, neatly impaling him, and Benrey, and -

Gordon’s breath catches and he dives forward again, skidding down the hallway to Joshua’s room, where a slice of light from his saguaro nightlight shines through the half-open door. He grabs the edge of the door and pushes it the rest of the way open, then smacks at the lightswitch on the wall and takes the rest of the space across the room to the bed in one stride. Inelegantly, he crashes to his knees next to the child-sized bed and still, _still_ reaches out first with his right arm, even though it ends in a stump a few inches below the elbow, and has for months now.

Joshua is small and warm where he’s curled up under the covers, and he twitches when Gordon’s left hand pulls the blanket down far enough to turn him onto his back.

There’s another set of footsteps thundering down the hall, and Gordon hears a muffled thump followed by a fizzy sound. He looks over his shoulder to see Benrey pulling himself out of the door jam - he’d overshot the doorway and no-clipped into the wall instead. His yellow eyes are wide, but in the bright light the pupils are needle-like slits, helplessly exposed in his normally shadowed face. He’s wearing his usual earflap beanie, Gordon’s sweatpants, and one of Gordon’s old hoodies, and he looks fuzzy around the edges, as if he could dissolve into smoke at any moment.

“Dad?” Gordon whips back around to stare down into Joshua’s squinting face as he brings one hand up to rub at his eyes. “Is the apartment on fire?”

“What? No,” Gordon says, completely thrown. It’s been less than fifteen seconds since he woke up. “I just - are you okay?”

“...Yeah?” Joshua glances around, still squinting in the bright bedroom lights. Gordon reaches blindly over and turns on his bedside reading lamp, and a heartbeat later Benrey hits the lightswitch on the wall, plunging the room into a warm half-light. Joshua opens his eyes more and looks up at Gordon with mounting concern. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, buddy,” Gordon says, and heaves a sigh that feels like it comes from the soles of his feet. “I just...I had a bad dream, and you were in it, and I had to check on you. I’m sorry I woke you up. Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep, okay?”

He looks over at the clock and winces. It’s 3:17 in the morning. 

Gordon gets back to his feet with only minor grunting and groaning, his knees clicking entirely involuntarily. He spends a few moments tucking Joshie back in and reassuring him that everything is fine, really, yes it is, no the apartment isn’t on fire, yes he will tell Joshua if it is. He’s not sure why fire was Joshie’s first thought - maybe something they’re talking about in school. At some point he realizes Benrey has vanished from the doorway, but there’s a faint light from the direction of the living room, so that’s all right.

In the end, he can’t help himself: he bends down and hugs his son, his heart still pounding, but his limbs only shaking a little. Joshie wraps his arms around Gordon’s neck good-naturedly, then leans up and whispers “Is Benrey okay?”

Gordon smiles a little at the obvious concern, and nods into Joshua’s shoulder. “Yeah, bud, I hope so. But I should go check on him - I think I woke him up by running around. You’re okay to go back to sleep?”

“Yeah,” Joshua nods and the word turns into a yawn. Gordon checks the clock. It’s 3:21 a.m. 

He switches off the reading light but stays seated on Joshua’s bed, his hand resting gently on the mound of blankets as Joshie snuggles himself back down. After a few quiet moments filled with his son’s gentle breathing in the cozy darkness, Gordon squeezes Joshua’s shoulder and stands up, pulling the door halfway closed behind him as he turns toward the living room.

It seems to take longer than normal to reach the end of the hall. Gordon isn’t entirely sure what he’s going to find when he gets there, and it’s almost jarring to see Benrey seated on the couch like normal, a video game controller in his hands, the TV’s glow lighting his features as he stares blankly at the screen.

It takes a few more steps for Gordon to realize the TV is frozen on a start-up menu for some obscure early-2000’s racing game, and Benrey’s hands are clutching the controller so tightly that the plastic is audibly creaking. His fingers are sharp-tipped claws, and he is so tense he looks like a statue. He’s barely breathing.

He’s not looking at Gordon.

Gordon suddenly feels faint. What if this is still the dream? What if - “Benrey?” he says out loud, and his voice cracks pathetically. “Can you look at me?”

Benrey’s head snaps up and he locks eyes with Gordon. The world remains as it should be - no skewed perception, no old VCR-bleed effects, no copper scent or shrieking sounds. Everything is fine - so why does Gordon suddenly feel like crying?

Instantly Benrey is up and on his feet, hovering at the end of the couch with one hand outstretched, but hesitating beside Gordon’s left arm. His other hand is gripping the arm of the couch as if his life depends on it. The controller is under the coffee table somewhere, and Gordon’s pretty sure he's tearing up and he’s not entirely certain if it’s from stress or relief or both. 

He reaches out and presses the fingertips of his left hand to Benrey’s chest where there was a gaping hole what seems like only moments ago.

“It wasn’t real,” Gordon whispers, half to himself, blinking away the moisture in his eyes. “It was just a dream.”

Benrey swallows hard, his mouth drawn down tight at the corners. There are dark circles under his eyes that have nothing to do with the normal shadows that always seem to linger across the top half of his face. He looks haggard.

He looks human.

“Are you okay?” Gordon asks, and Benrey breaks, collapsing back onto the couch like a severed marionette. Gordon lurches forward at the movement, but he couldn’t hope to catch him, and he doesn’t need to. Benrey curls up against the arm of the couch and buries his face in his knees, his shoulders shaking.

“First fuckin’ thing you do,” he’s mumbling, “after all that shit, the first fuckin’ thing you do is ask about me?” He jerks his head up to stare at Gordon with too many too-wild eyes. “You’re the one who - you - you almost - I could’ve -”

He clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head, reaching up to tug the beanie lower on his forehead. Gordon steps around the couch and sits gingerly next to him, close enough to feel the cushions move with Benrey’s trembling. After a moment’s consideration, he reaches out and presses his hand against Benrey’s back.

Benrey breathes in sharply, tilting his head slightly to look sideways at Gordon. Gordon’s not sure what expression he’s making right now, but Benrey makes a high sound and uncurls, crashing against Gordon’s side like a wave on a beach and wrapping his arms around Gordon’s torso.

He’s still shaking, and Gordon’s not sure what to do.

“It’s okay,” he says uncertainly, even though he's not sure about that himself. “I’m...I’m here, and I’m okay, and Joshua - Joshua’s okay - but that wasn’t him, anyway, he wasn’t ever even there - _fuck_ …” He trails off as Benrey squeezes him tighter.

“M’sorry,” Benrey mumbles miserably into Gordon’s shoulder. “M’sorry, m’so sorry -”

“Hey, no, it’s okay,” Gordon interrupts. “Just - is that gonna happen again?”

Benrey jerks back and stares up at him in abject horror. “ _No_ ,” he says sharply. “Never. I know what’s - what to look for, now, and I won’t - I’ll make sure you’re not around if I need, if I gotta update hardware or whatever, just in case.”

Despite the rambling nature of his statement, his face is earnest, all of his visible eyes focused on Gordon. This is important to him, which is nice. It’s important to Gordon not to experience anything like that ever again, and it’s gratifying to see they’re on the same page when it comes to that.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. That’s...good. That’s good.” Then he blinks. “What about Joshua?”

Benrey’s eyes flick to the hallway and back. “Whuh?”

“He’s - I mean, I was pulled in because of all the sweet voice, right? But you’ve been using it on Joshie, too, so why didn’t he get pulled in? Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled he wasn’t actually there -” _don’t think about him running screaming from the headcrabs, don’t think about the bloody spike of leg coming down on top of them, don’t ever think about that ever ever ever_ \- “but, uh...why wasn’t he?”

Benrey looks pensive, pulling back a little from Gordon and frowning. His jaw works, then his eyes widen and he swallows thickly, obviously holding back some sort of sweet voice.

“M’not Coomer,” he says after a short silence, and Gordon has to take a moment to puzzle that one apart. In the dream, in the reset space, both of them had been able to use their mental image of Dr. Coomer as a sort of soundboard to explain ideas to each other that were too complex for them to manage on their own. He’d been a subconscious manifestation of all the words they needed. But they don’t have that here. They have to find their own words now. That's hard for Benrey at the best of times - and this is definitely not the best of times.

“You can use the sweet voice to talk, Benrey,” he says, hoping he’s not screwing up. “It shouldn’t hurt anymore, right?”

“I don’t...I dunno.”

Well, that’s not reassuring. Gordon sighs. “Then can you try to explain with words? You can take your time, it’s fine. It’s just...I gotta know, man. It’s my _kid_ ,” he adds helplessly.

Benrey makes a small, wounded sound and turns his head to sing out a low tone of mournful purples and grays. Gordon watches them hang in the air for a moment before fading, completely at a loss.

“Joshie’s...he’s pretty new,” Benrey says quietly, still looking away from Gordon, who frowns blankly.

“Six isn’t very new, man. Maybe in the grand scheme of things…”

“No,” Benrey says, breaking off and huffing out bright green bubbles before trying again. “New to me,” he says.

Gordon watches the lime green glow fade. Lime… “Time,” he says. “Exposure time? You’ve only known Joshua for three months, and you didn’t use the sweet voice on him for the first week or so… But with me, it’s been months. Well, with a gap after…uh, is that what you mean?” Good save, Gordon. Don’t talk about sort of killing the guy you’re currently kinda cuddling with on your couch.

Benrey nods, then shakes his head and grumbles to himself. It comes out as several multicolored streams of orbs - some hold their trajectory, some drop to the coffee table and carpet, and some rise up into the air. As unobtrusively as possible, Gordon reaches his hand up and taps one, tensing as it bursts and splatters his fingers with bubblegum pink liquid light that dissolves swiftly into nothingness. There is no pain, only the familiar cool sensation that always comes with sweet voice contact. Gordon feels a shock of relief run through him - good to confirm that the pain got left behind in the dream world, too.

“You’re not _looking_ ,” Benrey says accusingly, and Gordon flinches slightly, glancing over at him, then turning his head to survey the riot of colors currently filling the living room like decorations in a slow-motion rave. 

It takes a moment, but he realizes he can identify a lot of the colors as ones Benrey has used on him. Between Black Mesa and the apartment, Benrey spends a lot of time spitting colored orbs at Gordon’s head, as if with enough effort, he could beam his unfiltered thoughts directly into Gordon’s brain.

Well, it kind of worked.

“You’ve only used the teal green heal beam on Joshie, haven't you?” Gordon says slowly. “I’ve gotten a full rainbow, but Joshie’s only gotten one or maybe two colors - right?”

Benrey nods, looking pleased.

“Okay, so it’s like a virus or something,” Gordon says, finally feeling himself on firmer ground. “Duration of exposure matters, and so does the intensity of exposure - the amount of different colors. I’ve been exposed for way longer and to way more colors than Joshie has, so your weird-ass brainscan thing picked me up as being part of you, but it doesn’t register Joshie because he’s only been exposed a little.”

“He’s small, too,” Benrey says, apparently unconcerned with being compared to a disease. “I could make it without something that size.”

That makes Gordon pause. Sure, Joshie’s a little kid, but he’s not malnourished or super short for his age or anything. The idea that Benrey has needed to regenerate chunks of his body as big as a six-year-old child before from nothing is...disturbing, to say the least.

“That’s kind of awful, man,” he says quietly.

Benrey shrugs and pulls his knees back up to his chest, tilting his head to look askance at Gordon. “S’your arm still, uh, still hurting?”

“Hm?” Gordon looks down at where his right arm is still pressed against his torso and realizes it’s tucked in the same position that it was while in the makeshift sling Benrey made on dream-Xen. “Oh, uh, no? I think it’s just...leftover habit.”

That made no sense whatsoever, but Benrey seems to understand anyway, though he watches with laser focus as Gordon stretches his arm out and rotates it. It definitely feels stiff, and the elbow joint aches cruelly, as if he’d had it locked in position for hours. Which actually might have happened, come to think of it. He isn’t sure how time passes in dream-Xen versus the real world. Maybe he’ll ask at some point, but it isn’t important now.

Something else is, though. Gordon swallows and looks over at Benrey, whose eyes flick up and lock onto his. “Thank you,” Gordon says, and those yellow eyes widen.

“Huh?”

“I know it was an accident to bring me there, but I think I was in real danger, and you did a really good job of keeping me safe and getting me back here,” Gordon says, because he has to make sure Benrey understands. It’s 3:48 in the morning and he’s shaky and exhausted and just now coming to terms with the fact that he really, seriously may have almost died, and the only reason he didn’t is sitting next to him on the couch.

Granted, Benrey is also the reason he was in danger in the first place, but like he said, Gordon knows that’s not his fault.

“Got you killed,” Benrey says raggedly. “Got Joshie -”

“I’m right here,” Gordon interrupts, slinging his arm around Benrey’s shoulders again. “And Joshie’s asleep down the hall, he doesn’t even know what happened, he just thinks his dad’s a crazy man who woke him up in the middle of the night for no reason.”

“Well _that’s_ not new,” Benrey mutters, but he leans against Gordon all the same.

“Hey now,” Gordon says mildly. He knows it’s true. Joshua hasn’t had the most conventional upbringing in any way, shape, or form, and that was before an alien moved into the apartment. 

“N’I’m sorry,” Benrey says into Gordon’s chest, his face tucked against Gordon’s shoulder. “I was...it was stupid, going back that far, there’s no - I just wasn’t, uh, wasn’t sure what’s...normal…”

Gordon squeezes him a little tighter. “No one knows what’s normal, man. We’re all just...doing our best, I guess.”

Benrey pulls back and looks up at him, and Gordon stares steadily back. He’s learned a lot about himself tonight - can this all be counted as one night? - and one of the things he’s learned is that he definitely feels more strongly about Benrey than he would have previously thought. He definitely trusts him, that’s for sure, and maybe…

Benrey’s pupils are huge as he stares at Gordon, his glowing golden eyes flicking back and forth between Gordon’s own. He leans up slightly, his mouth twisted a little like he’s gnawing the inside of one lip, and Gordon’s left hand is trapped behind him, but if he had a right hand he’d bring it up to trace across Benrey’s mouth right now, smooth the quirk from his lips and the lines from his face. Instead, he takes a slow, deep breath, inhaling the scent of dried sweat and more than a little body odor and the underlying faint ozone smell that’s always surrounding Benrey, and tries to decide if he should say something else or just go for it, whatever the hell _it_ is in this context.

And then he hears fabric rustling down the hall, and looks over to see Joshua stumbling into the room, sleepy-eyed with his blanket half-dragging on the ground. 

“Dad? I can’t sleep,” Joshua says, oblivious to the way Gordon and Benrey are curled up together on the couch - and when had that happened? Benrey’s half in his lap, how did he even _do_ that?

“Okay, buddy, get over here,” Gordon sighs, leaning back and feeling cool air waft into the space between his and Benrey’s torsos. Benrey leans back as well, pulling away from Gordon and picking up his feet so Joshua can squeeze past the coffee table and climb up onto the couch between them. There’s an odd look on his shadowed face, half pensive, half perturbed. 

Joshua wriggles down into the space between Benrey and Gordon, and as Benrey tucks the blanket around Joshie’s feet as he settles himself mostly on Gordon’s lap, Gordon feels something clicking into place like a key in a lock.

“Tell me a story?” Joshua asks, yawning and leaning his head on Gordon’s chest. But he’s looking at Benrey as he says it, and Benrey smiles.

“Sure thing, little gamer,” he says, and launches into a soft-spoken rendition of the main Heavenly Sword plotline. Joshua interjects a few times - “and Kai was there, too, right?” and “What about King Bohan?” - but slowly his eyes start to droop as Benrey’s monotone voice drones on, skipping carefully over the more gruesome parts.

Joshua slumps more against Gordon, who brings his right arm up to cradle his back and keep him tucked against his chest. Joshie’s feet are wrapped up in the blanket and tucked into Benrey’s lap, and Benrey’s head is almost on Gordon’s shoulder as he finishes talking about the Raven Lord leaving King Bohan to die on the battlefield - without mentioning anyone pecking out anyone else’s eyes. He pauses there - the evil defeated and good triumphing for now - and Joshua is asleep, his mouth open a little to herald the eventual arrival of what is sure to be a masterful drool spot on Gordon’s shirt.

Gordon cannot bring himself to care. Joshie is here, and Benrey is here, and they’re all okay. They’re going to be okay.

He reaches up and presses the palm of his left hand against Benrey’s jaw, and Benrey straightens with a deep breath, his lips parted just enough to see the sharp edges of his teeth. Gordon rubs his thumb under Benrey’s eye, then tugs him forward enough to press a dry kiss to his forehead. He hears Benrey inhale sharply and smiles against his brow, then pulls back just enough to drop his chin and press his lips to the skin just above where his thumb is resting, high on Benrey’s cheek.

When he pulls back, Benrey is staring at him, wide-eyed and apparently lost for words. Gordon smiles at him and moves his hand a little to press the pad of his thumb against the corner of Benrey’s mouth, drawing it up a little. Benrey blinks and licks his lips and Gordon understands what it means when people say someone looks like they have hearts in their eyes. Benrey looks like his whole soul is in his eyes, presented to Gordon without any expectation of return. And Gordon is only a little surprised to realize that this is not a new look on him - it’s just the first time he’s let himself think about what that look means.

But Joshua is curled up on both their laps, so there’s only so much they can do now, and Gordon wants to do things right. So he just smiles crookedly and softly says “we’ll talk in the morning, yeah?”

Benrey stares at him for a moment more before his brain catches up, then he swallows and nods rapidly, the earflaps on his beanie flopping. “Wh - yeah, bro, let’s - that’ll be - that’s - yeah, okay.”

Gordon grins a little more at him, utterly charmed, then pulls Benrey’s head down to rest on his shoulder again. Benrey shuffles himself into a better position, then brings his left hand up to brush against Joshua’s hair before settling it below the stub of Gordon’s right arm as additional support. 

“You’ll keep an eye on him?” Gordon murmurs quietly, his own eyes finally growing heavy as Benrey nuzzles his collarbone. He leans his head sideways to rest his cheek on the top of Benrey’s beanie, knowing that he’ll have a crick in his neck come morning and not caring in the slightest.

“Yeah, ‘course,” Benrey says, as if it’s a given. And maybe it is. Maybe it has been for a while now, and Gordon just didn’t see, just like he didn’t see Benrey’s caring expressions, or the real colors of his sweet voice. But he’s looking now, and somehow, when he wasn’t paying attention, they’ve become something like a family.

They’re all tangled up, the three of them, but the threads are aligning, and here on the couch in the dark, they fit like perfect puzzle pieces. For now, that’s enough. The rest can be dealt with in the morning.

Gordon drifts off with his son in one arm and his eldritch-creature-slash-alien friend-person-slash-something-more under the other. Joshie is here, and safe, and Gordon is here, and Benrey is exhaling pink and blue bubbles of sweet voice that rise to fill the room with floating lights. 

Gordon Freeman falls asleep - and this time, he does not dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, okay, this was a fun ride for me, and hopefully it was fun for all of you, too. If you're interested in more run-on sentences and Joshua accompanying Gordon to weird-ass places, check out the HLVRAI/Among Us crossover I've started with the overly pretentious title of "Some Stars Are Not Enough." That one I only have the barest hint of an outline for, so who KNOWS how long it'll be or where it'll end up. We can all find out together! 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and comments - they truly mean the world to me! I've started a Tumblr to contain all my fandom/writing stuff, so come yell at me there - @antilocaprine


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